Madison starts its weekend-long Halloween revelry this Friday, with area officials urging participants to celebrate responsibly or face 'strong action' in the future. While this warning may seem standard, it is far from hollow. A similar celebration in Boulder, Colo., where reckless behavior drove the city to discontinue its Pearl Street Mall Crawl, could foreshadow the future of Halloween in Madison.
Citing destructive behavior similar to conduct Madison has witnessed in previous years, Sgt. Fred Gerhardt of the Boulder Police listed people climbing and falling from flagpoles, overturning cars and breaking windows as reasons the City of Boulder decided to cancel the function.
'The number of fights and assaults became a safety hazard. We had to actually shut down streets,' Gerhardt said. 'The cost to the city came to the point where we could no longer have it occur.'
Boulder Police public information officer Julie Brooks highlighted the collateral damage resulting from over-attendance as a key element in deciding to shut down Boulder's celebration.
'It was dangerous. It was not that the Mall Crawl was a violent event; it kind of became dangerous because of the number of people in such a small area,' she said.
After attendance peaked at 40,000 in 1990, Boulder first tried to eliminate the disruptive visitors by closing off the interstate highway to those who could not prove residence in Boulder.
'The majority of offenders were not from the city, which is why [they] felt closing off the city to non-residents would be effective,' Brooks said. 'In the first year, they reduced the crowd by 25,000 people.'
Ultimately, Boulder decided on a three-year plan to eliminate the celebration entirely.
Destructive visitors are common during Halloween weekend in Madison as well. Yet in reference to shutting down highways as a means to control the number of Halloween attendees, Police Capt. Mary Schauf said, 'Madisonians in general, I do not believe, would think that is a fair and reasonable way to police our city.'
Having investigated Boulder's highway shut-down, George Twigg, Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz's spokesperson said, 'That is something that's easier to do in Boulder due to geography, but not something that is practical here.'
Schauf said, 'We all should become students of what works well and what doesn't in the context that each situation in each city is different.'
Banning access to guests is not a measure officials plan to take this year. However, the mayor, Twigg emphasized, 'will take some pretty strong action if we have problems again this year.'
