Holiday Youths Run Wild in Palm Springs

Easter-vacationing students ran wild through the heart of this exclusive desert resort Friday, blocking Palm Canyon Drive, tearing clothes off terrified women, terrorizing merchants and pelting police with rocks and bottles.

Police dispersed the crowd by force after a four-hour confrontation and then closed the center of town to all traffic. There were about 80 arrests, but no serious injuries.

Authorities declared an emergency and summoned help from other law enforcement agencies to break up the crowd of 1,200 that surged into the streets shortly after 2 p.m.

‘The Crescendo’

“Problems have been on the rise all through the week,” Palm Springs Police Lt. Gary Boswell said, “and this was the crescendo.”

The first hint of real trouble Friday came when several women reported their purses stolen in a park near the center of town.

Officers moved in, Boswell said, and were met by a barrage of “rocks, bottles, dirt, beer cans and just about anything else they could get their hands on--anything that wasn’t nailed down, and quite a few things that were.”

“Some of the people in the crowd were spraying officers with Mace (a chemical similar to tear gas),” Police Sgt. Dave Goodwin said. “And one of the men said he saw a student armed with a Taser (an electric stun gun).

“You try to arrest one of them and you have 500 others all over you for it.”

Officers retaliated with tear gas and orders to disperse--which were not obeyed.

Catering truck driver Stan Mozer said a crowd of youths overtook his truck on Palm Canyon Drive, tore open the doors, stole the food--and assaulted him when he tried to resist.

“One guy turned around and hit me on the side of the face with a 16-ounce Coke bottle,” Mozer said. “But when I pointed the guy out to the cops, they wouldn’t arrest him.

“I guess they were too busy trying to control the crowd.”

Women Assaulted

Officers reported several incidents in which young women riding in open cars were sprayed with beer or soaked with water from ice chests--and three young women told police they were “groped and then stripped” by men who reached through the open sun roof of their car.

A witness said two women in an open convertible, wearing T-shirts over two-piece bathing suits, were surrounded by a group of a dozen young men who tore off the shirts and then began ripping at the bathing suits.

They finally were able to drive away, holding tattered remnants of clothing.

Other students stripped off their own clothing and exposed themselves to passers-by.

Street Closed

About 200 officers finally managed to restore order by closing Palm Canyon Drive (California 111) to traffic and clearing all vehicles and pedestrians from a four-block area.

Property damage was minimal, police said, but about 80 students were arrested for drunkenness, assaulting police officers and failure to disperse and several of the revelers were treated at Desert Hospital for cuts, bruises, severe intoxication and inhalation of tear gas.

By early evening, the crowd had broken up and moved into outlying parts of town, where they slowed traffic to a near-standstill and staged impromptu parties on normally serene residential lawns.

Palm Springs and other nearby resorts have long been a popular destination for university and college students on Easter break, but police said the estimated 15,000 visitors crowded into area hotels this week is nearly double the number of arrivals in the last few years.

Surprised by Violence

Sgt. Goodwin said he and other lawmen had been prepared for “a certain amount of trouble” during the Easter Week holiday, but were surprised by the number of incidents--and their violence.

“I’ve been here eight years,” he said, “and this is as bad as I’ve ever seen,”

In the past, he said, there had been sporadic problems around hotels, motels and rooming establishments, but this year the youths seemed to congregate in the downtown area.

“It’s a younger, immature crowd of high school and first-year college students who have no respect for the rights of others or for authority.” Goodwin said. “We were able to contain the situation until this afternoon.”

Police Reinforced

The 35 Palm Springs officers originally assigned to crowd-control duties in the downtown area were not enough, he said, and so in late afternoon, a contingent of 60 Riverside County sheriff’s deputies were moved in, along with two dozen additional officers from Cathedral City, Desert Hot Springs and other nearby communities and 61 California Highway Patrol officers.

Goodwin said the main police strategy was to close off the main trouble area--Palm Canyon Drive and other streets in the center of town--to disperse the mass of revelers into more easily managed groups.

“We weren’t concentrating on arrests,” he said. “The main thing was just to move the crowd out.”

All the same, he said police have made 314 arrests--more than twice the average for the spring break--since the holiday week began last Friday, and other officers called the uproar “the worst since 1969.”

1969 Trouble Recalled

That was the year a throng of vacationing youths--many of them diverted from Newport Beach by reports of water pollution--ran amok during Easter Week through the center of town and in scenic Tahquitz Canyon.

Several dozen serious injuries resulted, including three youths who were shot when a crowd tried to pillage a filling station. Police finally dispersed the mob with tear gas and made nearly 500 arrests.

Times Staff Writers Ted Thackrey Jr. in Los Angeles and Mike Penner, Gene Wojciechowski and editorial assistant Danielle Fouquette in Palm Springs contributed to this story.