And now for some local stupidity. For yet another year, the famous Halloween party in Madison, Wis., ended with police in riot gear spraying crowds with tear gas.

I’d like to invite you at this point to watch some raw video footage and news report (Windows Media) courtesy of NBC 15, as well as a news report (Flash) from ABC 27.

This year’s party turned out a lot less violent than previous years, and up until 2 a.m., the biggest incident was someone setting off an orange smoke bomb around 12:30 a.m.

But around 2 a.m., police inexplicably decided to shut down the streeet and run everyone off. They made an announcement over the street’s new public address system, which many people didn’t even hear, and pissed off those who did. Then police began forcibly clearing the street, pushing people off into the sidewalks. This didn’t go over too well either, and at some point a few people decided to push the police off the street. It worked. The police retreated.

They returned minutes later in riot gear, and began spraying tear gas to drive the crowds away, which pretty much killed the evening for everyone.

This of course is what they wanted: to kill everyone’s evening.

I don’t quite understand what drove police to decide to try to run off 100,000 people at 2 a.m., who weren’t even out of control at that point. Nobody that I could see was causing any sort of problem until the police tried to forcibly disperse the crowd.

The police could have handled this much better, simply by letting events run their course, and people decide to leave on their own, which they would have anyway, as the bars closed down and more alcohol became scarce. It’s clear that the police escalated this non-event as far as they could, apparently hoping to get the chance to use their nice tear gas sprayers.

As for the mayor, who says he wants to “cancel” Halloween, if only he could, I wouldn’t be too surprised if he told police to escalate the situation to ensure that it got out of hand, so that he can score political points.

Let’s look at this again. You’ve got 100,000 drunk people who are doing nothing but having a good time. It’s 2 in the morning. The bars are closing. You’re the police. What do you do? Do you let them continue to have a good time, and take their time about going home, so long as they aren’t setting fires and vandalizing businesses, or do you try to forcibly disperse the crowd?

This is a no-brainer. The mayor and the police made the wrong choice. The only real disappointment here is that after five years they haven’t figured out how to deal with this annual event.