the cops have had the resources to bust every rave every weekend since the 1990s.
one reason it didn’t happen as much back then (although there were occasionally nasty scenes even in “safe” areas like SE England) was because landowners and locals didn’t complain as much (bear in mind the farmers had bigger subsidies and the economy was way better).
Another was technology – although cops had all the surveillance kit they had an outdated analogue radio system, about 25 years old by that point. It had two drawbacks – one was that by the 1990s, people could easily afford radio scanners to listen to the cops 😉 – the other was that during summer in SE and Eastern England, the Police radios often picked up the sound tracks from foreign TV channels, which made it unsafe for officers to use them for tense situations like closing down a rave!
by 2004/05 many constabularies had switched to the digital Airwave radio system, which can’t be scanned, usually works in rural areas and can even work as a telephone so a moaning local can talk straight to a cop on their radio to give them directions to a rave site…
A local issue in East Anglia is that there has been a history of working class resistance spanning centuries (going back to the middle ages!) so over the years anyone in authority here has been trained how to deal with stubborn people and to be equally stubborn, using escalating levels of force to achieve their aims…
