Curtains for Summer Jam? Curtains for Summer Jam? (October 28, 2005)

Cops struggle to control violence at yearly Shoreline hip-hop show

By Jon Wiener

To understand Mountain View's lawsuit against Clear Channel, one need look no further than the annual KMEL Summer Jam concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre.

The hip-hop show has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue each year, but the city has seen next to nothing. Both Shoreline operator Bill Graham Presents and radio station KMEL are owned by the same media conglomerate, a fact that is at least partially responsible for a city-sponsored audit's determination that the company has underreported the revenues from Summer Jam by an average of $458,000 a year. At the 6.75-percent rate the operator pays the city under terms of the lease, the city believes it has been missing out on more than $30,000 a year from that concert alone.

But it's not just money that has city officials seeing red over Summer Jam.

Despite a massive police presence at and around the amphitheater, violence once again overwhelmed officers at this year's Aug. 21 show.

Police chief Scott Vermeer gave a presentation to the city council two weeks ago at which he detailed his department's struggles to control the crowd. Fights broke out between rival groups of concertgoers from Oakland and East Palo Alto. At one point, SWAT teams stormed the lawn area to break up such a fight. The reduced presence of police outside the amphitheater left venue security to be literally overrun by people who had not paid for tickets.

In other incidents, one person was slashed with box cutters, and another was reported carrying a gun inside, Vermeer said. Outside the amphitheater, concertgoers abandoned their cars in the middle of the road to block police from interrupting brawls.

The violence peaked with the shooting death of East Palo Alto resident Nocomes Noel III on Old Middlefield Way that afternoon, which police say they have traced to the concert.

Representatives from KMEL and Bill Graham Presents did not respond to requests for comment, although they did point out that Noel was far away from Shoreline Amphitheatre when he was killed.

"To get something like this under control," said Vermeer, "We'd have to take a totally different stance than we do with any other show. The staffing is going to be huge."

This year, not a single officer got the day off. Seventy of the 96 officers in the force were assigned to staff the show, with the rest working out of the department's Villa Street headquarters. The department bills the amphitheater for the show, and in the past the tab has run as high as $46,000.

This is not the first time police have had trouble with the show. In 2000, a riot that apparently began at the concert spilled into town, and resulted in significant property damage and a litany of arrests.

"It's simply not appropriate. We can't have events of that type, period," council member Matt Pear told the Voice . "You have to provide for the safety of the citizens first and foremost."

Pear and his colleagues reacted with particular surprise to Vermeer's report that police require even the musicians to go through metal detectors back stage at the show. "That's different," Pear said at the time.

Vermeer says he is mainly concerned with figuring out a way to provide police services for the event in the future. He said this would likely require requesting assistance from other cities and taking a zero tolerance approach with traffic and narcotic violations of the sort that officers tend to ignore at other shows.

"In a perfect world, they'd cancel it," said Vermeer. "But I don't get to make that decision."

While many council members expressed doubt that they would approve the show next year, they may not even have to discuss it next year. The city and the company, which have filed dueling lawsuits against each other, are due in court starting Feb. 6 -- and the judge has refused to block the city from throwing Clear Channel out for breach of the lease.

E-mail Jon Wiener at jwiener@mv-voice.com

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