Last weekend was the first in more than a month that there were no shootings in Old Town. Businesses in the district say they hope that trend continues, but they've also created the Old Town Safety Association to help stop the violence.
Michael Neth is back for a night of fun after keeping his distance.
"I heard about all those shootings going on, and I thought I would just stay away from downtown for a while," Neth says.
To calm those concerns and weed out trouble makers the manager of Heroes Sports Bar has a plan. The way it works is that every customer hands over their driver's license to a bar employee who has a smart phone with a special scanner attached to it. The scanner reads the magnetic strip on the back of every license.
Eric Davisson says the name, address and birth date on the license are recorded and saved along with the time of the scan.
"If there is a problem with an individual later on, the information we would make available to police if they are developing a timeline of a crime or something like that," Davisson says.
Davisson hopes to get the other Old Town bars to scan licenses also and create something of a safety network.
"We would like to get to the point where we can share that with other clubs, so we can flag a troublemaker before he gets into another club and starts trouble somewhere else," Davisson says.
Davisson says customers can be assured the information will only used for security reasons, and their information will otherwise remain secret.
"It's nothing that isn't already on your driver's license that we're checking every time you come in anyway," Davisson says. "We're not using that information. We're not selling it to companies for mailers or anything like that."
He says it's all about keeping the right ones in and the wrong ones out.
Also, Vice Mayor Janet Miller met with Old Town businesses. She says they discussed strategies already in place. They also talked about changes that could be made, like creating a no loitering ordinance after midnight.
