RHONE: Spring break hasn’t changed. We have.

For the first time in three decades, it was a sanctioned event with a city issued permit. City officials, taking a page from the spring break crackdowns in some Florida destinations, enacted parking regulations, curfews, security checkpoints and a large police presence to control, and ultimately rid the city of spring breakers.

But not everyone agrees with the crackdowns. “Anytime you have a group that large, you have people doing things that aren’t appropriate,” said Julia Pearce in an interview last year with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The former mayoral candidate of Tybee Island said any restrictions placed on spring break revelers should also be applied to other high-volume events such as the Tybee Irish Heritage Parade or the Fourth of July.

For whatever reason, a certain ire has been reserved for spring breakers.

Tighter regulations and heavy police presence in Panama City Beach, Florida are a response to what mayor Stuart Tettemer described to News Nation as a “party environment that draws predators” from broken homes who “don’t know how to act in public.”

Presumably, it is criminals these city officials hoped to limit with regulations, and while those rules seem to have worked, at least for now, the attitude and environment they have created is also having an impact.

A friend staying at an Airbnb in Tampa with her family during spring break was flummoxed when someone called the police on her two children, who are ages 5 and 8. The neighbor told police they were being too loud. The community has a noise ordinance from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m.; not at noon when the kids were playing in the pool.

But in the heightened state of zero-tolerance created by spring break crackdowns, residents are encouraged to think of everyone as a potential predator or rule-breaker.

In this environment, intolerance becomes a virtue.

The neighbor yelled expletives at the children and later, after arriving home to Atlanta, my friend got a phone call from an untraceable number. A man’s voice asked if she had just returned from vacation before telling her she was a bad parent of disrespectful kids and hanging up.

Calling the police on children who are barely out of preschool and harassing their parents may feel like justifiable actions to residents in towns that have declared war on spring break, even towns that have billed themselves as family-friendly destinations.

Meanwhile, the fake IDs, underage drinking and illicit drugs — all illegal activities that have been the hallmark of spring break in this country for more than a century — show no signs of stopping.

This year, a group of teens from Decatur was arrested and evicted from a vacation rental in the panhandle because the person who rented the house was not 18 and the inhabitants allegedly had a stash of marijuana and a stolen gun.

It would be easy to assume that spring break only started going off the rails in the 21st Century but that would be incorrect.

In 1960, with the release of the film “Where the Boys Are,” (based on the book of the same name), the modern concept of spring break was delivered to the masses.

The film starred Yvette Mimieux and George Hamilton as college students from elite universities in snow laden states headed to Fort Lauderdale in search of fun, sun and either sex or spouses depending on their gender.Most of the film is focused on drunken debauchery while the most serious crime in the movie — the sexual assault of a young woman in a motel room — is delicately glossed over.

A year after the movie’s release, thousands of students flocked to Fort Lauderdale for spring break. When police tried to curtail their activities, a riot broke out. Hundreds of students were arrested for theft, assault, flipping a squad car and other crimes. The rioting happened again in 1967 for three days prompting beach closures, curfews and other rules that sound eerily familiar to some of the measures being taken today.

We have been in a 50-plus year battle with spring break, a rite of passage we created that has supported and popularized unruly behavior since its inception.

Instead of us taming spring break, did spring break tame us? Its antics, a drain on our patience, pushing us toward increasing, and sometimes questionable, levels of intolerance.

Read more on the Real Life blog (www.ajc.com/opinion/real-life-blog/) and find Nedra on Facebook (www.facebook.com/AJCRealLifeColumn) and X (@nrhoneajc) or email her at nedra.rhone@ajc.com.