After cracking down on the North Beach Street Festival and the Jazz Fest, it looks like the Powers that Be are all set to crack down on North Beach itself. At issue is the Broadway section where complaints have been made about all sorts of drunken behavior. Stuff like fights and public drunkenness and underage drinking and rowdy behavior and even the occasional non-monkey knife fight. So on Thursday, the city announced a crack down on the Broadway section of North Beach. Said Aaron Peskin in describing the weekend scene, it's a "virtual war zone" by which he means it's like a war zone except without the bombs, bullets, death, mayhem and anything that would make it anything like a war.

As a result, there will be kind of an inter-city tag-team approach to dealing with it. Cops will arrest anyone caught drinking in the street and will check out those party buses to make sure nobody is drunk (good luck with that). They will also have drunken driving checkpoints and will set up a special Straight to Jail van for people who are arrested. The Fire Department will make sure the clubs and bars aren't too over-crowded and the Building Department will make sure all of those clubs and bars are up to snuff code-wise. And the Department of Parking and Traffic will tow illegally parked cars. Says Gavin: "We've said enough is enough" and then threatened to resign if he wasn't able to solve public drunkenness in North Beach.

Apparently the area gets in about 7,000 on Friday and Saturday nights, which is a lot of people, and how does one determine that anyways? Why are there so many people there and why are there so many problems there lately? Terrance Alan, a nightclub owner and the chairman of the San Francisco Late Night Coalition, says it's because of crackdowns on nightclubs in Oakland, San Jose, and Alameda. So let's have another crackdown.

We suppose we should make a snarky comment here about how a few drunk people get out of hand in a fairly rich neighborhood and you have cops galore whereas people are dying almost every night in a not so rich neighborhood and nothing seems to be getting done, but y'all probably got there within the first sentence or two.