metpol actually don’t do that badly keeping the troublemakers out of notting hill carnival, especially considering the racial issues etc. its very costly though to the taxpayer and requires a lot of CCTV watching and CID resources…
@process 386010 wrote:
not sure its a conspiracy, but more festivals are reporting that the police are becoming more and more difficult to work with, making them jump through hoops and then seemingly purposefly (sp?) replying late with any objections they have meaning the organisers dont have enough time to reply or try and negotiate with them. seems like a lot of forces have a bit of chip on their shoulder about something.
Legal festivals were hard to put on in the mid 1990s, it was only a remnant of Blair’s “cool britannia” they were begrudgingly tolerated during better economic times (and the other costs of them overlooked) to keep the youth quiet..
one issue is other big UK commercial festivals don’t whinge about deploying sniffer dogs and CCTV and pass the costs onto their mug punters (who still pay them!) Another is posts on facebook and forums “I went to ***** (legal) festival and got really fucked on (lists of various drugs)” which counts as evidence there is a drug problem at these events… drugs are illegal whether we like it or not!
another (which affects even the big commercial festivals) is there is a small but significant minority of people what behave like complete scum there.
A couple of years ago people were talking about the big festivals like V and global gathering and there was rum stuff happening like people just getting randomly punched, girls being sexually assaulted… some of these incidents (such as the beatings at V festival) certainly were reported to the cops.. also each reported theft from tents etc and anyone needing NHS treatment due to overdose/alcohol/heatstroke counts as a black mark for licensing….
