Gainesville Police Department is urging city commissioners to shorten the hookah lounge opening hours

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GAINESVILLE, Florida (WCJB) – Gainesville police officers are urging city commissioners to change the hookah lounge hours.

It is a push to better regulate crowd control and possibly reduce violence.

Deputy Police Commissioner Lonnie Scott said one of the first steps in resolving street violence is crowd control.

He said that opening these shisha lounges after the bars closed does more harm than good.

“It’s about the behavior of the people who are there. If it wasn’t a problem, the police wouldn’t be there. At 2am we have other things to do, ”said Scott.

This advance emerged from the meeting of the city commission on Monday.

Scott said many of the shisha lounges operate as dance halls and bottle clubs.

He said there just weren’t enough officials to solve the problem.

“All of this is against the law and the ordinances that we have made. They usually try to bypass them. The change we want to make is to make sure that at 2am just like the bars have to close, ”said Scott.

Scott said there had been shootings due to the sheer volume of people inside and outside the building.

Gainesville city commissioner David Arreola said the crowd control problem had created a snowball effect.

“When these shisha lounges get full, people have already had a lot of drinks. It’s really just a place where we want there to be some kind of regulation for public harassment, ”he said.

At the moment, the city commissioners are working with the police to come up with a language on how crowd control measures can be better enforced.

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The post Gainesville Police Department is urging city commissioners to shorten the hookah lounge opening hours first appeared on Daily Florida Press.

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