Ocean City council to decriminalize “open containers”
The Ocean City council just voted 6-1 to change carrying open containers of alcohol outdoors from an arrestable offense to a municipal infraction. If the bill is made into law, after the final vote in two weeks, it wouldn’t mean that everyone was free to walk around with open beer or liquor bottles, just that people caught in violation of the rule would be fined $100-$200 dollars rather than being arrested.
The general tone of the discussion has been centered around the benefits of reducing public drinking vs the risk of police harassment. Obviously, in the wake of the massive brawl outside Seacrets earlier this month, some locals as well as legislators are nervous about appearing to condone bad behavior, but on balance it doesn’t seem likely to me that reducing the sentence to a relatively steep fine will actually encourage people to violate the law. And reducing police harassment is a valid goal, in my opinion, since arresting people for this kind of infraction will pretty much inevitably lead to gray areas involving discrimination and harassment.
Just to give you an idea of how likely it is that this change will lead to open containers becoming legal: the all-knowing wikipedia tells us that only 5 jurisdictions in the United States permit open containers, incuding the Las Vegas strip and the French Quarter of New Orleans. Kind of hard to imagine the boardwalk joining that company, is it? I’m pretty sure that our local jurisdiction is aware that people don’t go to OC for the same reasons they go to Vegas — since generally what happens here is more likely to be posted on flickr and mailed out on family postcards than to, y’know, stay here.