THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, March 3, 1995 TAG: 9503020183
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 42 lines
Clubs whose patrons get in frequent trouble with the cops are touchy enough for city officials to deal with. Cities aren't in the business of discouraging entrepreneurs, but they are also in the business of preserving the peace for residents. Balancing those two interests requires city authorities to be attentive to process any time they conflict. You'd think the city would be especially attentive to legalities when the club attracts black patrons, when recent efforts to close similar nightspots in neighboring cities prompted allegations of racism and when one of the owners of the club is also president of the local NAACP chapter.
But process went especially wrong after a special grand jury returned a ``presentment'' against Mr. Magic's nightclub on Newtown Road. That's the first step by which the city may get a business to stop being a nuisance or close. That first step needed taking: In the past year or so, police have increasingly been called to Mr. Magic's premises, and for increasingly violent offenses.
But nobody - not the city, nor the club's owners and staff, nor its former resident agent, nor a Newtown neighborhood that has less than its share of peace - needed the bungling in paperwork, procedure or both that got people arrested who should not have been arrested.
The series of mistakes made but not caught and corrected would be a comedy of errors - except that the arrestees may laugh all the way to a law-suit against the city.
Potential liability is apparently one reason city officials aren't saying precisely who - the commonwealth's attorney's office, the clerk's office, the judge, the police - got what wrong.
But somebody in the Municipal Center shouldn't be waiting on a civil court judge to decide what went awry, how it's fixed and who has heck to pay. by CNB