Another bottle of sparkling wine about to pop. Photos by Greggory Moore.
It’s a gross understatement to say that I’m not a morning person. Fortunately, I have a schedule that accommodates my needs. But once a year, on Pride Sunday, I arise volitionally at the unheard-of hour of 9AM and make my way over to a spot near the end of the parade route to join with a group of friends as part of the community on Long Beach’s lovingest day of the year.
It’s also the day when Downtown most closely resembles Burning Man—the costumery, the festoonery, scantily-clad revelers everywhere you walk, DJs rocking open-air parties block after block, the warmth and openness and happiness of just about everyone you meet, people who, within at least this one little stretch of spacetime, feel free to do just about whatever they want.
This vibe is aided by the laissez-faire approach taken by law enforcement. Noise restrictions—including those on amplified music—are ignored. Officers turn a blind eye to the thousands of people conspicuously drinking alcohol on public streets, instead confining themselves to making sure the parade route is clear.
The fact that it works, and works well, might give us pause to wonder at whether Long Beach is overregulated. As a libertarian (n.b. lowercase-L. This is a question philosophy, not politics), I believe society should have as few laws as possible, and that those laws should be a) important to a pragmatically functioning society, which should center on the idea of limiting harm; and b) enforced.
So when I look at Long Beach and see a needless and silly law allowing Simon & Garfunkel to play acoustically without a permit, unless I join them on tambourine—not because there’s an ordinance against me or my tambourine, but because three or more acoustic performers (never mind with amplification) is not allowed without a permit (see LBMC Sec. 5.72)—I see us cutting off our nose to spite our face.
While bad and needless laws should be altered or abolished altogether, sometimes the most immediate pragmatic move is simply to ignore them, such as what took place this weekend. It’s ridiculous that a barbershop quartet is not allowed to sing at a salon opening without a permit. This ludicrous law ought to be ignored for as long as it is in place, with violations tied to volume and inappropriate hours, rather than an arbitrary limit on the number of people. (And if you talk to small businesses and event organizers around town, you’ll hear complaints about how that’s just scratching the surface of the onerous overregulation in this city).
The medpot situation offers an interesting before-and-after view of enforcement versus non-enforcement. Prior to Long Beach’s enacting any sort of law on the subject, it was estimated there were three dozen dispensaries within city limits, and the City was taking a “wait and see” approach as various lawsuits in SoCal cities that had banned dispensaries made their way through the courts.
Then Long Beach passed an ordinance allowing them—ironically, not really altering the number within the city, but simply shuffling around the locations—which was later found to be illegal based on many of its details (such as its permitting process). At that point, instead of merely repealing the ordinance, the City did a complete about-face and banned dispensaries entirely. All along the police had been conducting raids against “rogue operators,” raids that suddenly became unlimited in scope, since all of the remaining dispensaries (over a dozen) are officially “rogue.” How many more hundreds of man-hours police will spend on enforcement actions before the inevitable day when residents vote to allow for marijuana—either on a statewide level recreationally (following in the footsteps of Washington and Colorado), or on a citywide level medicinally—is anyone’s guess.
The point here is not another of my pro-pot rants, but to consider what might have happened had Long Beach maintained the hands-off policy in place prior to 2010. Would the city—whose residents favor legalization for even recreational use, never mind medical use—really have gone to seed, or would things be not unlike they are today, except with a more dispensaries, less pot-dealing on the street, and all the City resources expended against dispensaries channeled elsewhere?
{loadposition latestlife}That last point is all about priorities. Police will be the first to tell you that they do, they must, prioritize. No police unit cruising down Ocean Blvd. between Junipero Ave. and Belmont Shore could fail to encounter cars exceeding the posted 30 mph speed limit, any more than a CHP unit on the 710 would fail to spot drivers pushing past 55 mph. As a matter of course, police usually look for outliers, those so flagrantly violating the law (and speed limits, I would argue, are not pointless laws) that they are endangering others. Moreover, it just wouldn’t be practical to attempt to issue citations to all the drivers motoring south of the 405 toward the Queen Mary at 60 mph, because everybody’s doing it, all without putting anyone in especial peril.
That’s why the bike-mounted cops patrolling the parade route didn’t bother trying to enforce LBMC Sec. 9.22 (“Public consumption—Prohibited”), and why any undercover officers who might have mingled with the crowd ignored it, even though violations were happening in plain sight mere feet in front of their eyes: it was impractical to stop, and it wasn’t hurting anyone.
If the City paid a little more heed to what is practical and what really matters, that wouldn’t hurt anyone, either. It might even sow the ground for the blooming of more of the joy that was in full effect Sunday. Because that joy wasn’t fueled so much by alcohol as by freedom.