Grundy – its an interesting article but about 5 years too late and contains a number of inaccuracies which don’t do ravers causes any good and unfortunately sound a bit naive in 2010.
The area Resilience documents aren’t just for “terrorists”, they are for anything ranging from floods and other weather conditions to a power cut in a remote village and just assess the emergency services capabilities and responses. Raves are fairly low down the list TBH.
OK that document is clearly written from the POV of the Police, but I have attended a number of such events myself in East Anglia as well as SE England and London and there are genuine safety risks. In 2006 there was a fire in Thetford Forest. In 2007 and 2008 there were a lot of injuries at raves either self-inflicted (people on drugs falling off high places) or due to violence amongst ravers (not from the Police) – in many cases due to people bringing their domestic arguments to the party, making them no better than the townies TBH.
The local people of Breckland area (where most raves used to happen) were bitterly divided into pro and anti-camps. Many have either been inconvenienced by raves or had their property damaged by ravers. There are others who have seen their own children succumb to self-destructive behaviour through overdoing drugs. in 2003/5 when there was good weather and a better economy a lot of the ravers took the piss….
Also the cops don’t just go steaming in with riot gear without warning – they often gave the ravers a chance to pack up and disperse elsewhere but people were very often stubborn and just ignored them.
Plus raves in this area currently do appear have led to a epidemic of problematic drug use amongst teens/twenty somethings and diverted their attention from education and employment much more than they did 10 years ago. in just three years I have personally witnessed the best part of a fair few of a group a happy go lucky group of youths destroy themselves through various forms of addiction and dysfunctional behaviour linked to the current rave culture. The impact on the region particularly to the resources of the NHS is actually as bad as anything “terrorists” could have done…
the way cops have gone about things isn’t ideal, but society is made up of many more people than ravers and no one seems to want to compromise..
ironically it seems that in CZ they have had several legal rave events since 2005…
