The focus on 2025 Ocean Boulevard shootings [in Myrtle Beach] began on April 26th when 11 people were sent to the hospital in a police officer involved incident where the juvenile who fired into a crowd was killed.
Several Ocean Boulevard shootings on successive weekends have happened since. Day trippers from towns approximately 100 miles in circumference to Myrtle Beach cause much of the violence … downtown on Ocean Boulevard.
Unsupervised teenagers ranging from 16 to 18 carry guns with them to the beach. Despite the pattern, Myrtle Beach police have yet to come up with a system for dealing with these unsupervised teens before the violence begins.
SC does not have truancy laws enabling MBPD to detain unsupervised juveniles until their parents retrieve them. Even when they identify potential violent teens, their hands are tied until the shootings start.
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Can this really be? A police force can’t detain suspicious people? They have to stand there waiting for them to start shooting?
June 15th, 2025 at 11:22AM
Police may detain a person only when they reasonably believe that the person is engaged in criminal activity. The detaining office must be able to articulate specific facts leading to that belief. (That’s a much lower standard than the “probable cause” required for arrest.) Merely looking “suspicious” is not enough to constitute a reasonable belief that you are engaged in criminal activity, and thank goodness: can you imagine how many perfectly innocent people would be detained just because some officer thinks their appearance or clothes or stance or location or activity is “suspicious”?
Youtube has scads of videos from self-proclaimed “First Amendment Auditors” testing officers’ understanding of basic Constitutional law. Take a minute to watch a couple. Far too often the police are totally ignorant of (or totally willing to ignore) the law on detaining or arresting people.
June 15th, 2025 at 12:01PM
Dennis: Thanks for that clarification. I guess it’s still a pretty big gray area, though. This is a notorious crime/violence location, and you’re looking at a hostile and disruptive group of people who begin loudly arguing among themselves. (Most of the shootings are arguments within groups of walkers that get out of hand.) Can you intervene? And if their behavior/answers continue to be hostile, can you detain?
June 15th, 2025 at 4:38PM
Constitutional rights often frustrate people (including police and even presidents) who think they know what needs to be done for the public good and hate to be interrupted by legal technicalities. That’s precisely why we need them.
One of those constitutional rights, called the First Amendment, allows individuals and groups to assemble peaceably, to be obnoxious and hostile, to call names and insults, to argue among themselves or with others, and so on. Another, called the Second Amendment, allows those individuals certain rights to carry weapons. Both Amendments protect people in “notorious/violence locations” just as much as people in Garrett Park. They can legally be detained only when their conduct becomes or threatens to become criminal.
June 15th, 2025 at 6:38PM
The Amendments aren’t unchanging monoliths; much of what’s important in the way we conduct ourselves in civic life depends on interpretations of them by the courts and, in this case, on state laws relative to speech/behavior and the carrying of weapons.
The Supreme Court just refused to review a restrictive part of Maryland’s gun laws, a challenge to them having been brought by pro-gun forces. My state continues to look vastly different, from a Second Amendment point of view, from bloody South Carolina (which has just about the highest gun homicide rate in the nation).
There’s nothing absolutist, on the ground, about these two important amendments. Yet you seem to describe them that way.
Similarly, SC has its own set of disorderly conduct/threat to public peace type laws that should indeed allow them to intervene and in some cases detain when obnoxious, insulting, hostile behavior threatens public peace. That’s why I said in the original post that I find it hard to believe that they can do nothing until people start shooting.
June 15th, 2025 at 9:04PM
I certainly didn’t mean to suggest the amendments were or should be absolutes. I was simply describing the current state of our law on speech, assembly, and arms.
All those rights have important but very limited exceptions. As I said, assembly, speech, demonstrations, and carrying arms are protected until they break the law. If they cross the line to disorderly conduct (strictly construed), assault, “true threats” (as the lawyers say), or other illegal conduct, the police can act. They don’t have to wait for shots.
Until then, even obnoxious behavior is still legal. A good thing, too, or many of those currently demonstrating could be arrested. As you have noted about campus speech issues, it’s not enough for observers to say they feel “hurt” or “unsafe.”