I went down to Riversplash on Friday night to see Independent Idols at the Rosie's stage. As the sun set, the crowd got bigger. The Rosie's tent had plenty of room for the fans, but along Water street, the mass of humans was almost too much. Still, I thought it was a nice enough gathering of people.
It was the first festival of the summer, and the weather was perfect. Sadly, there were crowd control issues on Saturday night. Someone got shot; perhaps it was the owner of the gun himself. Some bottles were thrown at the cops. It got ugly.
The hammer came down on Monday night when city officials declared that the future of the festival is up in the air. If 60,000 people attended the festival like they say, and 7 of those folks got arrested, wouldn't that seem like a low number of arrests? What if the idiot who fired a bullet into his foot managed to keep the gun in his pants and didn't fire the shot? Would we be having this situation? I wasn't there on Saturday night, but a friend who was there on both nights said it was a mob scene. Give the Riversplash sponsors a chance to do some crowd control for 2009. Don't pull the plug just yet. Heck, it usually rains that weekend.
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