“We cannot afford to allow these clubs to ruin our city.”

It’s Monday night around 8 p.m., and I’m laidback in a chair watching an incident unfold on a television screen. I watch intently as five or six police cruisers roll up to a crowded nightclub parking lot around closing time. I’m watching dash cam footage as one of the cruisers enters the main lot, when a white sedan appears out of nowhere and crashes into the front the Ford Police Interceptor. 

A large group of bar patrons gather and begin screaming and yelling. A uniformed officer on foot quickly moves through the crowd.   He approaches the white sedan and observes a man in the driver’s seat holding a black semi-automatic handgun. The officer immediately draws his weapon, demanding the driver to drop his. It’s an intense, life or death situation.  

Then out of nowhere another guy in a long white t-shirt and baggy blue jeans with a handgun tucked in the waistban, leans in the window of the sedan, threatens the driver then spits on him.

And if that’s not enough the screen switches to another scene unfolding on a different dash cam that shows a patron getting beat down in the middle Monroe Street, in what looks to be a gang fight.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t watching a re-run of COPS. No, I was in the council chambers at the Dearborn Administration Center, with about 50 other outraged residents watching Dearborn Police footage of officers responding to a call at the Liv Lounge in West Downtown Dearborn. Liv operates out of the old Kiernan’s Steakhouse building. The council is holding a special meeting to discuss the liquor license renewal for the nightclub.

Evidently ever since last year when the Lounge opened the club has been a nuisance with routine criminal activity. Thankfully the officers on this night were not seriously wounded and there no actual shots fired, which according to reports and newspaper clippings, is more than we can say about other nights.

All in all, DPD had footage from about 19 police calls to the lounge in just the last year. I’ll go out on a limb and speculate that’s more than all the calls made to Kiernan’s in the last 50 years.  

DPD also speculated the actual number of incidents caused by patrons from this lounge is much higher. But DPD cannot take into account all of the calls from residents who witnessed criminal activity erupting from the lounge but spilling into the streets, other parking lots or even residential neighborhoods. 

To make matters worse, Liv Lounge isn’t the only club that is a nuisance. The Nar Bar which opened last year, along with the Post Bar also have a long rap sheet. There was a shooting at the Nar Bar last year, and I believe two at Liv this year, including one on April 3. 

It’s a mess. As you might imagine, this is totally unacceptable here in Dearborn.  

The amount of police presence and law enforcement resources allocated to deal with these nightclubs on a nightly basis is enormous. This is not good. It’s also very irresponsible for city administration to ignore this problem, jeopardize our quality of life and unnecessarily put our men and women in blue in harm’s way.

Because of their failure to address this problem, city council is now forced to deal with these costly and time consuming liquor license hearings. It should have never gotten this far.  

You see, we residents can put up with a lot of things. But parking lot shootouts and gang fights are not on the list. Neither is listening to people swearing and watching them smoke weed, while leaning against parked cars in front of our houses with the stereo rattling our windows at 3 a.m.  

Not to mention the trash leftover from these nightclubs. I spoke with an employee at the Dearborn Historical Museum who told me that every Monday morning they spend the first few hours picking up liquor bottles, drug paraphernalia and trash from the parking lot and front lawn of the museum.  

We can argue back and forth all day long about closing swimming pools or banning smoking in the parks, but I think we can all agree that this garbage has to stop.

We cannot afford to allow these clubs to ruin our city. Dearborn is too nice of a town. We have always been the gold standard for what a city should be. We cannot afford to earn a reputation of gang fights and shootouts. And lastly we cannot afford to allow this issue to jeopardize public safety and our quality of life. 

Call your council member’s and let them know we don’t want this stuff in Dearborn.