'If You Don't Plan, It's Going To Be Catastrophic': Luther Campbell Warned Miami Beach Officials Ahead Of Chaos
MIAMI BEACH (CBSMiami) – Well-known rapper and local football coach Luther Campbell faults Miami Beach officials for not planning on how to handle the large crowd of people coming for Spring Break.
"It's government using the same handbook," he said. "And basically that handbook consists of creating a police state, having no organized events, you know, just allowing a complete free for all."
Campbell said he offered to help months ago in planning events that could have prevented the mayhem.
"I said, look, if you don't do anything this week of Spring Break or Memorial Day weekend, it's going to be, is going to be, catastrophic for you guys because you're talking about a situation where people have been locked up in the house for almost a year and they're going to come running out to the beach," he said. "You need to have events on the beach. You need that. You need to open up these hotels and have events at the hotels. You need to you need to have seminars and speaking engagements. You need to let them have their fraternity step shows and all that, make it a college-friendly event."
"The city of Miami Beach has a great working relationship with the hotels," he continued. "They can tell in a matter of minutes how many people are coming, where they're coming from based on the occupancy at the hotel. So they already know that these kids are planning way ahead of time. So, you know, your numbers went up in hotels during a pandemic. So, again, you can if there are things that as far as government can do to make it to if you don't want to have this event, if you don't want to have people over there, you just tell the hotels your occupancy is at 50 percent or 25 percent. You and at the same time, you just you know, you say we're going to have before you got to have an eight o'clock curfew, and that's what we're going to do. Or you close it down, no different than what you did in the beginning of the pandemic."
Campbell, who rose to fame with the group "2LIveCrew" and who is now the football coach at Miami Edison Senior High School, has been very vocal about people staying safe during the coronavirus pandemic.
In December, he spoke exclusively to CBS4 News about his own tough battle with the virus and spoke about his concern over young people crowding into clubs, not wearing masks and practicing social distancing.
He says now, not planning ahead for Spring Break, even during the pandemic, was a bad idea.
"So they can't hide behind the fact that, OK, because it's a pandemic, we want to we want to not schedule any events. They made that decision on that phone call that they do not want to have events during this time or Memorial Day weekend. And they wanted to then have the events the following year. And I told them that is going to be a disaster."
