Tickets issued for St. Patrick’s Day street party
Niagara Regional Police issued tickets to residents of Jacobson Avenue Tuesday in relation to a massive St. Patrick’s Day student gathering.
Police handed out 16 tickets for noise bylaw offences and two for Ontario Liquor Licence Act offences to various people who live on the St. Catharines street neighbouring the Pen Centre.
Const. Virginia Moir said it wasn’t feasible to ticket partiers on Friday because of the size of the crowd — estimated to be about 3,500 — which police didn’t want to see turn into an angry mob.
“A crowd like that, it’s just making sure everyone’s safe, everyone’s being responsible the best they can,” Moir said.
“It’s really just crowd control at that point.”
While police were expecting some St. Patrick’s Day parties in the area on March 17, they weren’t expecting a crowd that size in one place.
“St. Patrick’s Day is very popular,” said Moir, adding party sizes are often dependent on weather that day. “We prepare the best we can for the amounts of people that are going show up. Sometimes we have various parties throughout the city. This one just happened to be, they all congregated to one street that day.”
The impromptu street party drew complaints from neighbours about noise, drunkenness and littering. One woman reported her car was swarmed by people and she couldn’t move forward or backwards on the street.
Police said beverage containers and snowballs were thrown at officers on scene. Police broke up the gathering at about 7:30 p.m. There were no injuries.
Moir said the NRP had officers specifically assigned for noise patrol in the Jacobson Avenue area Friday and it’s something they routinely do for St. Patrick’s Day.
On Friday, they were also dealing with the unfolding manhunt for Justin Kuijer after his seven-yearold stepson was found critically injured at a Queenston Street residence and an RBC bank employee was stabbed at the Martindale branch. Kuijer is wanted for second-degree murder in the death of Nathan Dumas and attempted murder of the woman.
Police were at five locations related to the Kuijer case. The service also had other high-priority calls and regular calls in the city, in addition to the 3,500 kids on one street.
Without the manhunt, Moir said there would have been more officers available ideally, but they likely still wouldn’t have issued tickets to avoid angering such a large group. She said the main goal was to keep the group under control.
“Hauling kids off and laying charges on scene, that would just take officers away from being able to keep people safe, keep people happy, no destruction to property.”
Brock University’s administration condemned the “deplorable” actions of some students in a statement Saturday. Volunteers and staff from the school took to the street to help clean up garbage that morning.
The school said it would meet with the city and NRP in the coming weeks to discuss how the incident can be prevented in the future.
Preventing another occurrence is something Mayor Walter Sendzik emphasized during a council meeting Monday night, in which he said Friday’s incident was not appropriate behaviour in the community.
The city has plans to create a nuisance party bylaw and will hold a public meeting about it on April 10.