On Tuesday morning, Hollywood Boulevard buzzed with camera flashes, as tourists snapped photographs of stars on the Walk of Fame, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, or a new wax sculpture of Judy Garland that had just been unveiled outside of Madame Tussauds.

Christopher Loomis was the only costumed character on Hollywood Boulevard on Tuesday after police made arrests over the weekend.

Notably absent from the scene, however, were any of the masked performers, dressed up as movie characters, that have become a hallmark of the boulevard.

Last Friday and Saturday, officers from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Hollywood Division arrested many of the characters on the boulevard, and warned others to leave.  The crackdown has left the area in front of the Chinese Theatre almost entirely character-free on Tuesday, except for a lone Spiderman, perched atop a set of newspaper racks.

Increasingly, as the number of characters on Hollywood Boulevard has grown, local organizations, including law enforcement, have come to see the characters as a public safety hazard, impediment to business, and a nuisance for tourists.

Capt. Beatrice Girmala, of the LAPD’s Hollywood Division, said a number of characters have been involved in violent confrontations.

“We’ve seen an escalation in aggressive and violent confrontations,” Girmala said. “We see it with tourists who don’t pay the suggested donations, and between characters who get territorial with street vendors. We’ve also received complaints that characters are standing on Walk of Fame stars and extorting people for money, refusing to move so tourists can take pictures.”

Girmala said most of the arrests had been for aggressive solicitation. She also noted the jam-up of pedestrian traffic along the sidewalk, which forced some people to walk in the street, and has led to accidents and injuries.

“If you’re not simply asking for a donation, that’s something that would require a business license.” Girmala said. “Our hope is to bring civility back to that stretch of Hollywood Boulevard, make it user-friendly, tourist-friendly, and local resident-friendly, so people feel they can come to the area. I think we have to get some form of regulation, so we know who’s out there under those costumes.”

Kerry Morrison, executive director of the Hollywood Business Improvement District (BID), said the characters have been a hot button issue on the boulevard for the past five years.

“The best description of what it was like to walk from Highland to Orange on Hollywood Boulevard was a gauntlet,” Morrison said. “Tour companies cropped up out of nowhere, there were CD vendors, hot dog vendors, and street characters. The situation was just crying for enforcement.”

For the past year, Morrison has worked with other local organizations as part of a Community Impact Team, which was convened by the 13th Council District Office, in hopes of coming up with long term solutions to the problems.

“Different agencies have looked very closely at what the laws are,” Morrison said. “We’ve looked at the tools we have and we’re trying to determine if we need a special district. I’m not convinced that we do, but we have to create a sustainable environment. The arrests give us a breather, and a chance to experience what it’s like without all the characters out there.”

Even some veteran characters acknowledge the need for some kind of regulation. Christopher Loomis, the lone Spiderman on Tuesday, has been working on Hollywood Boulevard for 10 years. He said the atmosphere began to get more aggressive five years ago.

“When I first started it was a lot different,” Loomis said. “There weren’t nearly as many characters, and back then there was only one person I would consider aggressive. But then a few people started being more aggressive charging for pictures, and that makes it more difficult for those of us trying to do it right, because tourists have already had a bad experience. I used to wonder, where are the police? I’d come to work and just be fighting people the whole time, because the police had left it unchecked.”

Still, Loomis asserted that law enforcement had no right to ban people in costumes from the boardwalk.

“The police were just arresting everyone in costume the other night,” he said. “That’s unconstitutional. We have the same right to be on the street as anyone else. They can come get the ones who are doing something wrong, I’m all for that. But you can’t just arrest everyone. They were just taking people down to the station to scare them, then releasing them because they had nothing to charge them with.”

For the time being, last week’s arrests have thinned the numbers of characters on the boulevard. It remains unclear, however, what options are available for regulating the situation over the long term.  Morrison said the Community Impact Team had discussed the idea of a registry for masked characters, so law enforcement could keep track of who was out there and make sure they paid taxes on their income.

However, Gordon Smith, communication director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, said that masked characters had as much right to be on the sidewalk as anyone.

“Solicitation is a first amendment-protected right,” Smith said. “Annoying tourists is not a punishable act. If there is a safety issue then that’s a legitimate issue and should be addressed through the city’s existing laws.”

However, Morrison insisted some kind of regulation of the characters was necessary. She said characters can make from $250 to more than $1,000 in a single day on the boardwalk.

“If there are twenty characters making $250 every day, that’s $5,000 a day and $1.8 million a year. Word is out that you can put on a costume with a mask and make a couple hundred dollars tax-free. I think those days are over. We need it to be safe, and for people to feel like they can see everything they want to see in Hollywood, and are free to walk on the boulevard without being harassed.”