With the mega-bout that is Floyd Mayweather versus Manny Pacquiao around two weeks away, everyone is preparing for the massive event, including law enforcement officials.
The bout takes place May 2 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department is gearing up for a busy weekend.
“We’ve been planning with all of our neighboring agencies, public and private entities,” said Roxanne McDaris, Lieutenant with the events planning section of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. “We’re going to be increasing our police presence as the crowd deems necessary. The fight is going to bring in quite a few more people than in their past fights, obviously being the largest fight in history.”
McDaris said that hotel rooms are basically sold out along The Strip, so nearly 150,000 rooms are going to be occupied and most of those are not going to be single occupancy.
Estimating that there will be about two-to-two-and-a-half people per room, she guessed that around 200,000 fans will travel to town to experience fight weekend, in addition to the locals that will join them on The Strip to enjoy the festivities.
The agencies that Metro is working with includes the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security, ensuring that everything goes as smoothly as possible during Cinco De Mayo weekend, which includes the fight and fight themed parties as well.
“We’ve upped our staffing and and our partnership with all these other agencies that are assisting us on the strip and sites off the strip with the cursory events related to Pacquiao and Maywather as well,” she said.
Touching base with the properties where the visiting fans will be staying at, keeping a line of communication will make dealing with hotels at or near capacity easier.
“We work a lot with the hotel properties that are hosting events, that have rooms sold out that night to make sure they have proper security in place and working with us as well for our responses,” McDaris said. “A lot of visual presence.”
With local Las Vegans worried about a repeat of when the last sporting event of this magnitude took place, in the 2007 NBA All-Star Game (per KLAS-TV Las Vegas) , police are using that experience , hat left a bad taste in locals mouths, due to violence and general rudeness of the fans, as a reference point for May 2.
“We quite honestly learn something after every event,” McDaris explained. “Whether it’s how you move traffic quicker, or who it affected that we didn’t think about. Obviously we’ve learned things since 2007, We’ve made a lot of progression since then in communications, both internally and our external partners.”
With that problematic situation under their belts, Metro is able to plot a goal and have steps in place to eradicate issues as they arise fight weekend.
“Because of the lessons we learned we have a lot more pre-planning, a lot more resources that will be in place to prevent things from happening, as opposed to being just reactive and responding to instances that happened,” McDaris said. “Whether it be fights or crowd control, or anything like that, with our planning and the lessons we learned we hope to be ahead of that and be ready for it before it happens.”
With crowd control post-fight becoming an issue after big fights, as made clear by the stampede that left 60 people injured after Mayweather’s bout last Cinco De Mayo weekend, police said those issues, to have been addressed.
“We work very well with MGM, both of our agencies and MGM, MGM Security and their corporate offices looked at all of that with a very critical eye, took some lessons away from that, just the structure of that area of the arena leading into the hotel,” McDaris said.”They’ve made some changes there, just to open it up to the crowd, and having a different exit pattern put in place so we can get that crowd out of their and moving a lot quicker, so we don’t have that congestion, and that choke-point, that caused a lot of that panic in the stampede.”
So if you are one of the nearly quarter-of-a-million travelers making their way to Las Vegas for the Mayweather-Pacquiao bout, McDaris wants to ensure you that the city will be safe, but still ready to celebrate Vegas style.
“We want everybody to come out here and have a good time and enjoy our city, as we have a lot to offer, which is why these big events come here,” she said. “We’re saying the same thing that we say for New Year’s Eve, be patient, there’s going to be you and 100,000 of your closest friends here to enjoy the same experience, so just be patient with the crowds, because we’re going to have large numbers. It’s going to affect our traffic, it’s going to be slow. ”
McDaris warned that if you will be drinking alcohol to be wary of the warm temperatures, as you can become dehydrated very quickly in the desert heat.
“Just be very aware of how far you’re partying, and be smart about that. Have somebody with you that can stay sober and be the lookout for the crowd,” she explained.
To help keep control of the massive amount of people that will be in town, police ae asking that tourist keep a watchful eye when they’re out, to help them monitor the action.
We always preach, “See something, say something,” related to any kind of suspicious act,” McDaris said. “A lot of people take it to the extreme, like a terrorist act. That can be the entire scope leading down to just a suspicious person, you think a crime is going to happen, or seen one happen, find an officer let us know about it.
“There’s a lot more eyes out there when citizens are paying attention, than just us.”
