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Tampa Bay area police departments beefing up patrols during Spring Break

Posted at 5:39 AM, Mar 13, 2017
and last updated 2017-03-14 09:48:57-04

Spring Break is underway and Clearwater Beach is one of the country’s most popular destinations. Sunday night, our ABC Action News crew rode along with Clearwater police to find out what kind of trouble is in our community.

Officers said so far it has been mellow compared to years past. That may be due to cooler temperatures.

But there were still several calls overnight. Clearwater police officers said most of the calls they get are disturbance calls and a lot of those are alcohol-related.

They also get called out on traffic disputes and crashes. There are specific officers dedicated to looking for drunk drivers. There are 30 to 40 extra officers on the street this week.

“We have what we call a Spring Break deployment where we’ve allocated manpower from units city wide to come out here and work spring break during the hours and days that are the most busiest so we have a tremendous amount of manpower out here,” Officer Scott O’Hare with Clearwater PD said.

Back in 2015, there was a brawl on Clearwater Beach that made for a scary situation for some Spring breakers. Officers said they haven’t seen anything like that this year, but they’re ready for anything.