‘Smooth’ So Far, Spa Awaits Biggest Wave of Partying Students

Having weathered its first swarm of about 7,000 vacationing students without major incidents, this desert resort community braced itself for an even larger invasion next weekend.

Police officials credited a get-tough strategy that includes issuing citations for the slightest infraction--more than 1,200 traffic tickets alone were handed out between Friday and Sunday--with preventing a repeat of last year’s beer-fueled riot.

Instead, the prevailing atmosphere was one of boisterous but generally peaceful dusk-to-dawn carousing.

“The strategy is working,” said Fred Donnell, spokesman for the Palm Springs Police Department. “This time of year it is definitely a zoo here, but this is the smoothest I’ve ever seen it work.”

Besides the traffic citations, police arrested 132 people between 7 a.m. Friday and 7 a.m. Sunday, mostly for being drunk in public. They also picked up 126 youths on curfew violations, Donnell said.

But the heaviest crowds are yet to come.

By midweek the city expects a second wave of youthful revelers to hit town, most of them to come from the University of California system, which has let out thousands of students for spring break.

Donnell pointed out that last year’s riot erupted on Easter weekend, the tail end of the traditional 10-day influx of students here.

In that incident, some of the estimated 15,000 vacationing students were involved in a bottle-throwing melee that cost the city $100,000 in overtime for police officers and $40,000 in damages.

This year, the city is spending more than $260,000 on police salaries and reinforcements to prevent that from recurring, city officials said. Some of the revenue generated by the citations handed out this week will be used to help defray those expenses, said Julie Baumer, spokeswoman for the City of Palm Springs.

By Sunday evening, police were swamped by the paper work resulting from the tickets and arrests they have made so far for infractions ranging from playing car stereos too loud and not having a license plate on the front of a motor vehicle to being drunk in public and resisting arrest.

“The paper work is starting to get insurmountable,” Donnell said. “On the other hand, we haven’t heard ambulances rushing any students to the hospital for problems arising over the weekend.”

Nonetheless, many fun seekers did not like the police tactics.

“I think it just makes more people mad,” said John Priem, 16, of Villa Park, who was ticketed Saturday for having passengers seated precariously on the back of his Volkswagen convertible.

In the Los Angeles area, hundreds of youths who did not make the annual trek to the desert also participated in the noisy but generally trouble-free weekend.

In the San Fernando Valley near Cal State Northridge, police were forced to dispatch a helicopter and six patrol cars when about 500 students crowded the intersection at Community Street and White Oak Avenue. The party was broken up by blocking off area streets and no incidents were reported, police said.

Also, in North Hollywood in the 10700 block of Magnolia Avenue, a crowd of about 400 youths was disbanded without arrests after neighbors complained about the noise to police.