Too much twerking is a no-go at one legendary Florida party beach — where cops showed up with paintball guns and pepper spray over the weekend to shut down the wild spring-break booty shakin’.
“No twerking! You will be charged with disorderly conduct!” The Post heard an officer from Florida Fish and Wildlife shout at a group of cheeky over-the-top female twerkers in Panama City Beach on Saturday evening.
The “Footloose”-esque bums rush came after a swath of violence in Daytona Beach that included four shootings and a panicked stampede at a party.
Panama City Beach, a longtime hard-partying spring-break mecca, has tried to clean up its reputation after its own struggles with shootings, out-of-control parties and sexual assaults in recent years.
“You can’t drink on the beach in PCB. You can’t even have coolers. And there’s an 8 p.m. curfew,” said Emory Gill, 21, who sells alcohol-fueled Jell-O shots on the beach in the nearby town of Destin, which has become a new panhandle party zone in the wake of PCB’s decline.
Cops in the local idyllic beach enclave of Seaside, which was featured in the hit Jim Carrey flick “The Truman Show,” also were out in force this weekend to make sure teen spring breakers minded their Ps and Qs.
Influencers on TikTok and Instagram have helped make the typically picturesque village a major destination for the teen and college set — leading to a new curfew for minors and an entire marketing campaign urging parents to keep track of their kids.
“Five years ago, spring break was absolutely crazy. But what we did was create this curfew and a campaign with the #ComeGetYourKids to encourage parents to keep track of their unaccompanied minors,” said Kevin Boyle, general manager of the Seaside Community Development Corporation, to The Post.
In Okaloosa County, home to Destin, deputies have recently issued nearly 300 citations for various party-related crimes, including alcohol-related offenses, the sheriff’s office told The Post.
Tommy Ford, sheriff of Bay County, which hosts Panama City Beach, said the problems are two-fold.
First, in recent years, high schools in nearby Atlanta have started coordinating their spring break schedules, meaning throngs of teens swarm into town like locusts.
Second: there has been the advent of “takeovers” — informal, flash meetups organized on social media.
“When you have thousands of people showing up in one place, there are some with guns. There are gangbangers. And you have crowd dynamics where someone pulls out a gun, and it causes a stampede,” Ford told The Post.
As for the twerking, it “is not inherently against the law unless it becomes lewd or if there is a noise ordinance complaint,” Ford said of the crackdown — which could be likened to the small-town ban on dancing in the Kevin Bacon classic movie “Footloose.”
In Daytona Beach, the local sheriff has vowed to crack down on instigators of mayhem and even sue the organizers of last week’s dangerous beach takeover.
Ford said he is concerned the crackdown will drive the throngs of youngsters to his town, but if they do come, “We’ll be ready for them.”
