Eight people were detained and ticketed Sunday during the Cinco de Mayo parade in Southwest Detroit as police broke up an “over capacity” crowd that blocked streets.
Thousands of people attended the parade down Vernor Highway and festival marking Mexico’s victory over the Second French Empire at the Battle of Puebla in 1862 pushing restaurants and businesses to double or triple their capacity, said Detroit Police Chief James White.
“We did not shut down Cinco de Mayo,” White said in a press conference on Monday afternoon. “Thousands of people attended and enjoyed the event. There were a number of instances where overcrowding was an issue. Some businesses had overcrowding with double or triple the capacity. The decision was made at that time to pause that business to help with overcrowding.”
White said the people who were ticketed were mostly for public intoxication or disorderly conduct. He also said some food trucks and businesses were operating on site without proper licensing.
The crowd enforcement at the Cinco de Mayo event followed a record-breaking NFL Draft in Detroit’s downtown that officials have said essentially went off without a hitch.
At-large City Council Member Mary Waters in a Monday statement urged Detroit Police Chief James White to appear before the council to discuss the festival’s early shutdown.
Waters says she wanted reassurance that the “early militaristic shut down of Cinco de Mayo activities” wasn’t “a reflection of racist xenophobic double standards not employed during NFL Draft crowd control.”
Waters noted she wanted White to discuss the successful crowd control associated with the NFL Draft activities April 25-27, which drew an estimated 275,000 attendees daily, and what she characterized as the seeming inability of DPD to handle much smaller crowds associated with the southwest Detroit festival on Sunday.
“Cinco de Mayo is the equivalent of a National Holiday to our Latina residents,” Waters said in a press release, adding the economic and psychological hurt inflicted upon residents and visitors must be addressed.
White decried any calls of racism against the police over the way the policing was handled compared to the NFL Draft late last month.
“I would say that it’s improper, unwarranted,” he said. “This is an event we support. Our own mayor walked in the parade.”
White said Monday afternoon that he spoke to Waters and provided her with more information.
“If they still want me to be there, I will be there,” he said.
On Sunday, Armando Perez said he was inside El Club attempting to return to the patio when he saw police officers heading in, telling the crowd “you’ve got to shut it down,” noting capacity limits.
“They shut the whole street down,” said Perez, adding he felt that the police action was “unwarranted.”
Perez said he’d attended the last four years and hadn’t seen anything like this in the past.
“We’ve never gotten shut down like this, it’s crazy,” he told BridgeDetroit. “There are always police for the parade and they always stick around after. But once they saw that there were hella people on the street, they started kicking people out.”
Also at El Club was Brad Gonzales, who said police weren’t “malicious” but they did demand that the club be emptied out.
“They didn’t give any particular reason. Also, when we were standing on the sidewalk they told us we couldn’t stand on the sidewalk, but as we know, we have the right to assemble and they clearly were breaking those rights,” he said. “It’s really unfortunate that they decided to make this move. It was really peaceful.”
Commander Shelley Holderbaum said Monday at the press conference that the enforcement was for the safety of the attendees.
“We had such a good show out, but the pedestrian traffic in the streets stopped the vehicular traffic and it would have been a public safety issue,” she said, noting that she grew up in the neighborhood and lives there now, so she understands the significance of the celebration for the community.
In a news conference wrap-up following the draft, Mayor Mike Duggan, White and other dignitaries lauded the three-day experience that drew about 775,000 attendees.
“We wanted to be courteous, we wanted to make sure that we were present and that it wasn’t overpoliced but that you could not go too far without seeing the police and that they were highly engaged,” White said of the NFL Draft strategy for the department and its federal, state and neighboring law enforcement partners.
White said that over the three days, the draft resulted in just two adult arrests and the detainment of two juveniles for fighting.
Reporter Malachi Barrett contributed to this report.