South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Police serve up Spring Break safety rules
FORT LAUDERDALE — While Spring Breakers may be out of the sight of their families back home, they won’t be out of the minds of Fort Lauderdale authorities, who pledged Friday to help keep them safe while they visit the city’s bars and traverse the streets and beaches.
As the annual vacation ritual for R&R-seeking college students entered its inaugural weekend, leading police and fire officials laid out some rules of conduct at a news conference at Las Olas Oceanside Park.
Major Bill Schultz of police department operations and Fire Chief Stephen Gollan said the objective is to ensure the young visitors will get back to their homes and schools in one piece.
“The role is to return you back home the same way you came here,” Gollan said. “Unfortunately, at this time of year we see a lot of injuries that are alcohol-related.”
Schultz laid out the following list of prohibitions and advice for public safety:
Alcohol: Possessing or providing it to people 21 and under is forbidden.
“It’s obviously strictly prohibited. It will be enforced by uniformed and undercover FL PD officers.” Open containers of alcohol “anywhere outside of an establishment is prohibited on Fort Lauderdale Beach both on the sand and on the sidewalks in the area.”
Fraudulent IDs: Possessing them and presenting them to a bar or restaurant is illegal.
Public indecency and disturbances: “Anything that is going to disrupt the enjoyable environment on the beach is prohibited and will be closely monitored by us.”
Disallowed items according to park rules: Tents, tables or amplified music on the beach.
Safety and crime prevention. “There is safety in groups. Always look out for everyone in your group. If you are traveling together, make sure you stay together.
“Always watch your drink, your purse, your cellphone or all of your personal belongings. If you set them down or your friends set them down, remind them to pick that up. Don’t leave anything unattended.”
Ride shares: Use the the information on the phone application to “match the driver’s photo, the license, the make and model of the car to what’s on your phone.”
Bar Watch Program: It’s back this year in the form of business-sized cards that imbibing visitors can use to test their beverages for drugs such as Ketomine or GHB that can lead to sexual assaults.
“We’ll be distributing those [cards] to the bars and to individuals in the coming weeks,” Schultz said.
Fentanyl watch
Both officers said their departments are equipped with Narcan, a brand-name version of naloxone, an opioid overdose treatment, to aid victims of fentanyl, which has led to thousands of deaths a year around the nation. Last year in the adjacent city of Wilton Manors, several West Point cadets who had leased a rental home were hospitalized or otherwise treated after overdosing on fentanyl-laced cocaine.
“We get Narcan on board to the individual as quickly as possible,” Gollan told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in an interview Friday.
“The key is the timeliness of the response. Here on the beach during Spring Break we have additional staffing both on police and fire, which affords the opportunity to get to those calls in a timely fashion and administer Narcan to reverse the actions of the opiate.”
Schultz told reporters
that narcotic-sniffing dogs will be “doing frequent checks of our beach. We absolutely are going to be watching for any illicit drug.”