The owner of the McDonald’s on the corner of West 3rd Street and Sixth Avenue, which was recently the scene of a violent St. Patrick’s Day fight that ended up on YouTube, met with the NYPD to talk about strategies for “[improved] safety and security.” As a police officer who attended the meeting told a West Village community board: “What we’re trying to convince McDonald’s to do, and what I think they’ve been receptive to, is treating their McDonald’s as if it were a bar past a certain hour of the night.”
Apparently, proposed tactics for doing that include cordoning off seating to prevent “lingering,” hiring off-duty cops as guards, and giving the NYPD remote access to the restaurant’s surveillance cameras, which sounds like more than enough to keep people out of there since, as the officer pointed out, they’re “getting every negative aspect of having to deal with policing a bar without the high profit margin of actually selling alcohol.” And the lighting is terrible.
