Recent incidents at a park in Crystal have police in that city concerned.
Groups of juveniles arrive at Becker Park by rideshare. They then engage in fights with Orbeez guns. They are toy pellet guns, which in some cases can look real.
Crystal Police Chief Brian Hubbard explains.
"A lot of them look like fun Nerf guns, and many of them don't," Hubbard says. "Many of the ones that we confiscated over the weekend are black guns that, from not much of a distance, don't look like a toy. They look real."
Hubbard says this behavior scares other people at the parks, and that over the last several days, crowds have been dispersed and arrests have been made. But after being kicked out of the park, the groups move into the surrounding business district and create what police are saying is even more chaos.
"This isn't acceptable," says Hubbard. "We're not going to allow it to happen, and we want that park to remain the wonderful amenity that it is. We need parents to know where their kids are and what their kids are doing."
Hubbard adds that even though they've dispersed crowds, made arrests and even closed down the park on Sunday, it hasn't stopped. Hubbard said Becker Park is not the only place where this behavior has occurred.
"We're gonna have a zero tolerance for this kind of disruptive behavior in these large groups," Chief Hubbard adds. "And so, we are taking a number of measures in terms of how we're monitoring the park and basically stopping these large scale gatherings before they get started."
