we're standing here at the corner of edison and juneau where on last saturday night we held an outdoor roll call where we promised a safe event we delivered a safe event i'm standing here with mayor tom barrett and i'm also standing here with josh janus who's the water street business association president now you've heard me talk about crime fear and disorder we can control crime we can solve crime the data shows that but the fear piece is tougher and controlling fear becomes tougher one non-representative tapes of disorderly incidents are played in endlessly as though they were representative of what happened in a largely uneventful night there was a fist fight on water street on saturday night that does not qualify as news what is news is that we had close to 25 000 people on water street saturday night without any major incidents this area was a budding downtown where given the large number of entertainment events we hosted on saturday night more than 45 thousand people were downtown in milwaukee this saturday when you added 10 000 people there were on either east north avenue or brady street or the third ward we had close to sixty thousand people using downtown milwaukee as a safe entertainment venue saturday night in all of district one which encompasses all of the areas i just mentioned there were a total of nine nine disorderly conduct arrests there were six fights reported in the entire downtown area city-wide on saturday night there were a total of 28 battery complaints 14 of which were domestic violence city-wide on saturday night we had about 622 calls for service evenly divided between 9-1-1 calls and routine calls for service not an unusual night for a warm saturday now what was newsworthy was we had record-setting temperatures saturday night over the last hundred years the average temperature on st patrick's day has been 43 degrees as you well know it was 72 degrees saturday night and the crowds reflected that reality now there were a lot of people downtown saturday night that's good news that so many people want to use downtown milwaukee as the entertainment venue of the metropolitan area we hope that many more of them return for the sweet 16 later this week they're going to have a safe night and the milwaukee police department is going to see to it that they have a safe night milwaukee deserves better than to be inappropriately represented by one incident because it happened to be caught on tape the data and the experiences of 65 000 people show that this is a safe environment last saturday and that deserves to be reported we had over 60 officers assigned just to north water street and over 100 officers working the entertainment venues of milwaukee we had sufficient officers there and i think you saw even in that snippet that our officers were rapidly available in large numbers the challenge just was what also the film shows is this street was packed and you get to a certain point where they're just natural crowd issues having to do with crowd management pedestrian safety and vehicular safety that late at night when a large number of people have been drinking as we continue to look forward we'll continue to devise ways to usefully prepare for and effectively manage crowds but i think it's important to note that the crowds were safely evacuated saturday night there were no major incidents involving negative crowd behavior you know it was properly policed people want to come downtown that's a good thing that means the city is perceived as a safe fun place to go downtown and it was evacuated safely and that i think is the big picture story that needs to be emphasized mayor barrett thank you very much chief flynn and i apologize for my voice um this is not from yelling during the basketball games or even yelling at my kids i just have a winter cold here it is summertime but i want to echo what the chief said that we had many many people in downtown milwaukee on saturday night they came down to have fun 99.9 percent of them had fun they had a good time and we had a bad incident a fist fight many times that happens but this is a safe area and we want people to continue to use these establishments because people did have a good time here and it's important that we get the message across that if you are in downtown milwaukee you are going to have good good place to have fun the police were here they responded quickly to the one incident that was caught on youtube but for most people again the vast vast vast majority of people they had a good time they enjoyed st patrick's day they enjoyed watching the basketball games they enjoyed the record temperatures um and we want to make sure that they know that it's it's a appropriate and safe and we want them to come back to downtown milwaukee to have a good time we've got many great proprietors josh will speak on behalf of the proprietors but again we want people to understand that this is a safe downtown and this is a good place to come for fun josh thank you i'm going to try and make this brief because i'm not a professional at this like these two gentlemen are i'm one of the owners of red rock saloon and mcgill cuddies and the president of water street association um what i really want to say is i feel like they made the right decision the problem by no means was any of the bars the bars do a very good job and we work together very hard to make sure that everybody feels comfortable in our establishments we do a great job of policing our own establishment and i mean i was down here a real long day work day for me uh and we had a great crowd up until uh we decided to close um so you know i really enjoy the fact that for the first time in my career i can call the police and say hey you know this is going on and we get an incredible response so all right is there anything else you'd like me to speak upon that's great just telling what a great job i'm doing um you know i think we want to make a very important point we did uh ask the bars to voluntarily comply with closing the bars at 12 30. we did that because of the crowd situation the fight actually happened to 12 40. but the point was we had a very very large crowd and we wanted to make sure that that crowd did not create any issues on its own it was remarkably and overwhelmingly orderly but given the capacity of water street we felt it was in everyone's best interest to close the alcohol providers down and they all voluntarily complied in fact two of the bars had already taken steps to close on their own as they were at more than capacity and it was a challenging night just in terms of managing the traffic and pedestrian flow but it's important to stress that the violence you saw was highly contained and remarkable in its both brevity as well as the fact that it was unrepresentative you