Things To Do In San Diego: Tuesday, August 27-Tuesday, September 3, 2019

We thought Nova went through her first week of school unscathed, and then today it all kinda fell apart with a full on meltdown and I almost cried for her because, as we can all attest, middle school SUCKS. So for those of you whose kids had your first day today, all I can say is good luck. Last week I caught Generationals and Pure Bathing Culture at the Casbah and Snail Mail and Choir Boy at Music Box, hung out with the sea lions on Thursday, watched the SDSU women's game, watched Darren's soccer game, hung out with my parents, swam at Fiesta Island, binge watched some TV, dropped by Habitat House for their farewell party with Joel P West performing, and spent the scorcher of Sunday at the Safari Park. This week I'm looking forward to Bryan Ferry, The Bird and the Bee, and Throwing Muses among others. I've been promising more updates but have been having some tech issues, so hopefully I can fix that soon and get back in my groove. In the meantime, listings are through Tuesday to get you through Labor Day weekend. After the jump.

More Info On Pacific Beach Labor Day (fill in the blank_____)

FreePB.org has posted more eyewitness reports about the Labor Day incident(s) in Pacific Beach.

More video:



From the videographer's point of view:

I eventually turned my camera off, but just as I did so the police went after several people with pepper spray. This caused mass chaos....and I immediately left the area and headed north on the beach. I honestly believe if the police left the scene after the arrest and did not use the pepper spray the situation would not have escalated to what we know is called the "PB Riot". All I know is that after I left the scene even more chaos erupted and what I see on the news is so shocking. I honestly believe both the disrespectful drunks who chose to piss off the cops are to blame, as well as the police who appeared to enrage the crowd even more by using pepper spray.

Other witness quotes:

From what I saw, no one could call the entire episode anything other than a minor disturabce effectively contained by the SDPD -- and certianly not a riot by any stretch of the imagination.- SH

I was randomly right there in the water next to the guy who started pushing the ATV. It looked to me like the ATV was semi deep in the water and slowing moving even deeper. Some kid got behind it and put a ton of effort into pushing it out of the water and calmly rolled it up to the cops. A few seconds after he [brought] them the ATV, they arrested him. It looked like at first people were walking up to the cops trying to explain to them the kid was helping them but I guess they didn't listen. I know the cops knew he was trying to help because they were watching him as he was pushing it up the beach to them. When they didn't let the kid go people started booing, a few empty beer cans were thrown at the cops, mostly just a bunch of sand being thrown. Then out of no where one of the cops charged at us in the water and started spraying mace, thats when people started throwing more stuff and it really got out of hand. -KG

The slipping slide people had had their slipping slide out for about 4 hours, which I didn't think was really that big of a deal. It got a little rowdy over there at one point in time (about 30 minutes before the cops showed up) when a bunch of people were sliding down it and a big group of guys was chanting "we want boobs". I went over there and checked it out for a little bit, no big deal. About 30 minutes later an office rolled up in his quad and went over to talk to those guys, probably to tell them they couldn't have the slide. While he was over there, some joker ran over and pushed the quad toward the water about 5 ft. The quad was already too close to the water, so the waves started washing up underneath and moving it around a bit (this was happening about 20 ft in front of me while I was sitting in my beach chair) Another guy who was just walking by, saw the officers quad in the water, he didn't know the first guy who originally touched it as far as I could tell. He decided to be a good citizen and grabbed the back of the quad and pushed it up out of the water onto dry sand. I don't know if the cop didn't see any of this or what, but he came over right as the guy had finished pushing his quad up to the high tide line. As the office walked up, to our surprise, he grabbed the guy who had pushed the quad out of the water and twisted his arm behind his back and cuffed him. By this time a large number of people were watching. Everyone started booing and yelling that this was a wrongful arrest, and the guy had done nothing wrong. This is when things started getting carried away, sand and beer cans started flying into the center where the officer was standing, at this point it was getting hard to see so I stood up to watch, there was another cop in the middle of the crowd at this time as well.-VL

Pacific Beach and the Labor Day Fight

I wasn't at Pacific Beach on Monday for Labor Day. In fact, other than hanging out on the deck at Taang! Records (before it moved), having a couple beers before a show at Cane's or having picnics at Tourmaline, I can't really remember the last time I went to any local beach for any reason. It's not my thing, never has been. The beach "lifestyle" has never really appealed to me.

My sister, her husband, and Johanna live in PB, however, so I do pay attention to what goes on in their 'hood. I recently read the Reader cover story and now the news that there was a "riot" in PB on Labor Day Weekend, and all I can say is that I'm not surprised. I avoid PB for a host of reasons, but the frat-boy, "bro", high-fivin' mentality that pervades makes me gag. I avoid douchebags at all costs.

The thing is I know how it is; a whole group of people take the blame for the stupid few who can't handle their booze, who have too much testosterone and want to fight anyone who even looks at them, and who generally have no respect or concern for anyone or anything. In my experience, these people are usually transplants to San Diego via the military or SDSU who are here to live the life they saw on MTV spring break specials. They are probably 5% of the people who hang out in PB. Get them in one group and you have some serious groupthink and mob mentality. They may be few, but they are asshole enough to keep people like me from going to the beaches in PB. Ever.

As a person who believes strongly in personal rights and freedoms, I have never supported a booze ban on the beach. I never thought I would, either. But when you see these herds of assholes on the beach, as long as they are there, I won't be. And I pay the sunshine tax, too, so shouldn't I feel comfortable enjoying the beaches of San Diego? I still don't support a booze ban, but this situation definitely makes you think of ways to fix the problem: no booze on holidays? charging a fee to use the beach? limiting the amount of people on the beach at any given time? banning anyone who says dude or bro more than 5 times in 3 minutes?

In fairness, I've heard there are various stories about what happened. I can't seem to find the clip, but my dad said that the news showed that the "riot" started after police were called to break up a fight. One of the cops left his quad in the water, the tide started to pull the quad in the water, so a dude started pushing the quad out of the tide and the cop tackled him, not realizing he was actually just trying to help. From that, the initial melee ensued (supposedly). I'm sure with thousands of people on the beach, there are thousands of varying accounts, but just watching any of these videos and I know why I don't do the beach "scene". (Found the video. See it here.






More amateur (and dizzying) video here, here and here.

Clearly, if you care about booze on the beach, either for or against it, this is the time to step up and make your opinion count.

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