Yes. At 12:30 am too. These kids should have been in bed. The businesses were open and operating. Large numbers of punks mulling around waiting for something to happen can scare away a lot of customers. These casual nocturnal gatherings frequently end in fights. I know exactly what they are talking about. I can understand the concern by the local merchants.
As can I but if the police cannot distinguish the loiterers from the customers they should just round everybody up?
They handled it poorly to say the least. They could have posted 4 cops in the lot, had them start ticketing the obvious loiterers and dispersed the crowd. This kind of mass incarceration for "being in the wrong place at the wrong time" is an omen of very bad things.
EBUCK
Yup. I remember one time I was driving down "the strip" in heavy traffic and pulled into the nearest parking lot to use my cell phone. Within one minute my car was surrounded by a bunch of punks who closed in on it for no other reason than I was there, and I was not "one of them".
The cops should have been enforcing the laws against the actual punks all along, so that the problem would not have festered like a boil.
Instead, they chose to ignore it -- and ignore the irate calls demanding that they "do something" -- until they finally chose to "do something" that was so outrageous that they could be confident that no one would be silly enough to ask them to "do something" any time in the forseeable future.