Downtown business owners and police met Wednesday morning to view police tapes from the Nov. 1 State Street celebration and discuss strategies and police procedures to stop the violence and destruction associated with recent Halloween weekends in Madison.

Businesses that suffered damage from the melee expressed anger and frustration with their losses over the weekend, while some owners acknowledged the weekend brought a large increase in revenue.

“In terms of the planning for the event, I think that by far this has been the most comprehensive planning,” Capt. Luis Yudice of the Madison Police Department said. “It required lots of resources.”

Police said there were 250 police officers downtown, and 150 of them were on State Street. The large number of police also had a large task.

“We made more arrests than we ever have before,” Yudice said.

The videotape the officers displayed was shot from the Statesider apartment building on the 500 block of State Street, and it aided in arresting people who participated in damaging the property of several State Street businesses.

“I just spend the [Halloween] night very concerned about what’s going to happen to the businesses and if there’s going to be violence,” said Sandy Torkildson, president of the State Street Business Association and co-owner of the bookstore A Room of One’s Own. “Before we were really positive; we really thought there was so much planning that this wasn’t going to happen again,” Torkildson said.

Torkildson described post-Halloween feelings of the affected retailers as being “discouraged and angry.”

“I think people don’t understand that for a lot of them, this was more than just a broken window. People like Tomboy Girl lost all of their product,” Torkildson explained.

“We pretty much lost everything, our inventory is going to be destroyed,” said Jane Weldon, co-owner of Tomboy Girl. “The guess right now [for damage assessment] is in the $35,000 range, but it’s going to continue to climb, because we’re out of business.”

“We’ll be lucky if we’re open by December,” said Tret Fure, co-owner of Tomboy Girl.

“I can’t tell you how many people I’ve run across in town who don’t even know about it.”

A divide exists between business that have a dislike for Halloween festivities on State Street and those that love the increase in business.

City Council President Mike Verveer explained that despite reccurring Halloween problems on State Street, most businesses want to continue with the event.

“The majority of businesses don’t want to throw in the towel. [They] don’t want to give up this annual tradition on State Street,” Verveer explained. “Despite the awful vandalism that seven businesses faced, the majority of businesses I talked to have benefited greatly from Halloween weekend.”

Verveer realizes there are only certain types of businesses that really appreciate Halloween weekend.

“These are businesses like convenience stores, restaurants, taverns, hotels,” Verveer said. “Sadly, the businesses that received a lot of damage this year were not the types of State Street businesses that received a lot of benefit from Halloween.”

The police overtime costs were higher than expected, Verveer said, attributing the expenses not to the disturbance, but from having to call in extra officers to patrol State Street. He added that the street was “jam-packed” with shoppers throughout the entire day Saturday.

There are doubts about whether the Halloween tradition will go on, but many think it will continue.

“I think it will continue, because it is a force,” Torkildson said.

“I think, overall, State Street Halloween is a really awesome, cool tradition,” Verveer stated. “Its just that the bottom line is we cannot tolerate a third year in a row of rioting. It would totally destroy a lot of State Street retailers.”