Do the Ends Justify the Means? A Sobering Dilemma

Big Ed heard the news and stroked his chin. He knows what Huntington Beach police are capable of. They once gave him a jaywalking ticket in the rain.

Now they’re back with something more provocative. At the Police Department’s behest, the City Council has given preliminary approval to an ordinance making it illegal to drink beer in a yard that isn’t fenced or on an unfenced patio. You can knock back a cool one on your open-air balcony, but not in your driveway or in the garage with the door open.

The cops have their reasons, though, and that’s what makes it interesting.

Huntington Beach is a past recipient of the Safest City in America award, except for on the Fourth of July when, oddly enough, it becomes America’s most dangerous city. It’s as if on our nation’s birthday, large numbers of the Surf City population are bitten by rabid dogs or inhale fumes that make them go nuts until daybreak on July 5.

That rambunctiousness has made for some good melees between citizenry and local cops, who, pound for pound, have a reputation of being some of the toughest guys around. But the citizens are no slouches, either: The town sports an inordinately large number of short-haired, muscled guys not afraid to go out after dark.

Convinced that the source of the problem comes in 12-ounce aluminum cans, the police are trying to make some serious intrusions into what local residents can do on their own property.

Big Ed loves these ends-versus-means debates. He usually comes down on the side of liking the ends but not the means.

That’s the case here. He’s surprised that an ordinance like this is even legal.

For the record, his family tree has some beer swillers hanging from a few branches, but Big Ed isn’t one of them. He never drinks beer at home, saving his imbibing for those rare occasions when he’s in a darkened bar eyeballing barmaids and pondering life’s inherent unfairness.

But some dudes like to party hearty, especially on the holidays. Something about their joy in being Americans, whether on the 4th of July or Memorial Day weekend or Labor Day, that seems to heighten the desire to crack open a six-pack.

Big Ed hates people who can’t hold their beer, but you know how some people are. Sometimes they get drunk. Sometimes they drink in their frontyards.

Under the proposed ordinance, though, you could get arrested in your frontyard even if you aren’t drunk.

Big Ed isn’t worried about being arrested on his doorstep in Huntington Beach--not for drinking beer, anyway--but he wonders what might happen if neighbors ever invited him over. It’s not a huge leap from there to picture them having a beer in the frontyard. Big Ed wonders how he’d react to being arrested for that. Probably not well. He’s wondering if he must limit friends to those who have fenced-in yards.

Perhaps the police don’t plan to hassle quiet residents who happen to be tinkering with the car in their garage and sipping a beer. If the new ordinance is going to be enforced that arbitrarily--and it probably would--it strikes Big Ed as a pretty crummy regulation. “It’s just full of mischief,” dissenting Councilman Tom Harman says of the ordinance, and his response is the sober one.

So much for the means.

But what about the ends? What about the notion of having a less besotted public on the Fourth of July?

Few things are more obnoxious than the town drunk. Multiply him by a few hundred and that’s what the Huntington Beach police say they confront on the Fourth. They arrived in a neighborhood one year to find furniture on fire in the street. No one envies the cops for trying to control crowds like some that have formed in recent years on the Fourth. On top of that, many business owners and residents have insisted that the police clamp down.

So, the authorities are in a dilemma. As authority figures often do when confronted with issues of order and personal freedom, they go overboard on the “order” side. The drunk and disorderly numskulls that haunt Huntington Beach on the holidays have helped create this pest of an ordinance, caring not a whit that it might nail some relatively innocent people in the process.

This is the kind of conundrum that drives Big Ed nuts. It’s not like he sides with the drunken mob, but is it the city’s goal to create a new set of lawbreakers? Didn’t someone once say that government is best that governs least?

How ironic this all started because of Independence Day. Any way to channel up Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and have them tell us, with specific reference to drinking beer peacefully in one’s frontyard, whether that is an unalienable right?

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.