Forums › Rave › Free Parties & Teknivals › Stop vandalism at parties
by Mr R@t
Last weekend, a new crew tried to kick off a squat party in Urban Reading. They’d done a few parties in conjuction with other people, but AFAIK this was the first one they had done all for themselves, and they had put a lot of effort into pooling equipment and getting it sorted for a good rig and light setup.
They had the party up and running, and around 01:00 The old bill arrived as they usually do – in Reading every main street has a camera pointing at it so you can’t hide much from them.
Negotiations commenced, usual stuff – who is “running” it, what are you doing about safety/fire exits, keep cars and people away from causing a safety hazard on the main road. The crew had just managed to get the cops to go on their way – when some little idiots smash a window above, showering the cops with broken glass!
As you can appreciate, they took a very dim view of this – so now they kit up in riot gear storm into the building with dogs and start hassling everybody.
The crew were lucky enough to manage to distance themselves from the vandals so they didn’t get their rig confiscated, but because of the damage they were forced to stand down and pull their rig out, and the cops get the window boarded up and the place secured again [and there were some homeless people I know who could have used that place to live in after the party was over.]
So what did the smashers achieve?
ABSOLUTELY FUCK ALL.
In fact they just cost Reading people their weekend party, and caused needless hassle to a brand new crew of enthu-siastic young people, so all the work they had put into the party and the money they spent was for nothing.
In the end most of the people went home pissed off whilst the remainder, instead of having a really good party in a decent venue had to cram into the front room of a residential squat with just a home hi-fi system where the residents were not prepared for a party [although a previous party venue, we couldn’t use it again as the place had had an official noise abatement and had to keep telling people to turn it down].
The Sargeant had even basically told my friend “look, if those kids hadn’t smashed the window we would have let you carry on until Sunday like we normally do”, and he even said “I know I’ll see you again at the next one, just learn from your mistakes this time!” So even the cops aren’t being that anti-party these days and are cutting the crews a fair bit of slack in my area, but they DO have to protect peoples property and investments. Thats what they are there for!
Another poster said his police area [Sussex] has just gone zero tolerance on illegal parties, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Hampshire and Surrey already are certainly less tolerant.
Even the Met has been getting heavier recently, whilst the southern part of the Thames Valley force area remains a “safe haven” for free parties.
However, if every Monday the Duty Inspector is starting his day with irate property owners ranting at him on the phone “those fucking rave pikeys trashed my building, and you didn’t even stop them!” – the polis aren’t going to continue being tolerant. Anyone with half a brain can see that!
Think about what happened in Reading last weekend , the next time any of you feel like smashing a window or anything else at a party venue.
Alex
that is savage! and such a shame for the crew, i hope their enthusiasm dosent falter,
tbh what they should of done is made an example of the idiots who smashed the window & fuckin batterd them,dragged them down to the dancefloor, used the headphones as a mic & explained to the revellers that the reason the party was getting shut down was because of said pricks & letthe crowd deal with them.
hopefully we shall start seeing more “info” on being respectfull of properties on party lines etc this year
I wrote this nearly 10 years ago. Most of that crew carried on partying (eventually became part of K32) but the vandalism didn’t stop.
By 2005 Thames Valley Police pretty much had a zero tolerance policy on Reading, and the damage to the buildings was one reason why the feds increasingly felt justified in storming in and doing stuff like pushing tables loaded with equipment and speakers over if they can get away with it and have enough units to do so (they never used to be as heavy as that).
unfortunately the situation was a lot more complex and bleaker.
Its simply not feasible to have vigilanté squads dishing out punishment beatings to suspected vandals (with the risk of misidentification) in a building they have no legal title to when even rentaguards and legit building owners would get sent down for seriously physically attacking a vandal themselves.
Especially when cops were already shutting down the party and present… realistically the only thing they could have done is removed the people with reasonable force and handed them over to the cops, but that would of course get the rave crew a rep of being “grasses” and lead to reprisals.
That said, TVP have in fact stepped in at various raves to stop various kinds of “vigilanté justice” being doled out, usually by arresting people from both sides… or have defused the aftermath of fights (having turned up along with ambulances)
What was worse is in many cases it wasn’t “random chavs” doing the vandalism.
It was people who otherwise claimed to be ravers, who knew the crews and were otherwise on friendly terms with them, and were surreptitiously doing damage in small groups avoiding those who might see them and challenge them (as they knew who to avoid!) Many of these kids weren’t bored chavs either but middle class “ravers” who had a lot of hidden anger and tension.
It was only several years later (after these idiots had thankfully stopped partying) I managed to work out some of what had been going on. IMO it was even worse than stuff like feds trying to infiltrate activist groups, at least the feds have a reason to “betray” people…
@General Lighting 416938 wrote:
I wrote this nearly 10 years ago. Most of that crew carried on partying (eventually became part of K32) but the vandalism didn’t stop.
By 2005 Thames Valley Police pretty much had a zero tolerance policy on Reading, and the damage to the buildings was one reason why the feds increasingly felt justified in storming in and doing stuff like pushing tables loaded with equipment and speakers over if they can get away with it and have enough units to do so (they never used to be as heavy as that).
unfortunately the situation was a lot more complex and bleaker.
Its simply not feasible to have vigilanté squads dishing out punishment beatings to suspected vandals (with the risk of misidentification) in a building they have no legal title to when even rentaguards and legit building owners would get sent down for seriously physically attacking a vandal themselves.
Especially when cops were already shutting down the party and present… realistically the only thing they could have done is removed the people with reasonable force and handed them over to the cops, but that would of course get the rave crew a rep of being “grasses” and lead to reprisals.
That said, TVP have in fact stepped in at various raves to stop various kinds of “vigilanté justice” being doled out, usually by arresting people from both sides… or have defused the aftermath of fights (having turned up along with ambulances)
What was worse is in many cases it wasn’t “random chavs” doing the vandalism.
It was people who otherwise claimed to be ravers, who knew the crews and were otherwise on friendly terms with them, and were surreptitiously doing damage in small groups avoiding those who might see them and challenge them (as they knew who to avoid!) Many of these kids weren’t bored chavs either but middle class “ravers” who had a lot of hidden anger and tension.
It was only several years later (after these idiots had thankfully stopped partying) I managed to work out some of what had been going on. IMO it was even worse than stuff like feds trying to infiltrate activist groups, at least the feds have a reason to “betray” people…
sometimes your posts make me loose hope, :hopeless:
Its exactly what I’ve seen over the last decade or so. I’m not the sort of person to bury bad news, thats what dodgy politicans do.
At the same time I also very closely monitored the feds and government, and during the early Blair days in particular they were slack as fuck about stopping raves and drugs, in comparison to what they could have done.
Some other folk (even “alternative types”) claim a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory that the govt did this to distract people from the war, but I think thats untrue (especially as the war didn’t start until 2003). The reality was that the economic times were better, so in town building owners (especially large faceless London based property companies) didn’t care as much about minor losses/damage, so they didn’t complain to the cops quite as much about things.
In bumpkinland, farmers were getting certain subsidies until recently, being paid taxpayers money to leave land unfarmed, which is where most of the raves ended up. A lot of these subsidies got abolished starting from 2005/06, when the zero tolerance started. A new computer system to paid the new subsidies caused a lot of payment delays, so farmers had to wait even longer for the remaining cash. I don’t think the backlash and clampdown in 2007 in EA was simply a coincidence. (also the Forestry Commission were having budget cuts and raves were increasing their clean up costs)
there isn’t any “anti-rave conspiracy”. if anything the cops were and still are much more worried about the rise of faith group and racial extremism than people dancing in fields but they still have to respond to complaints about crime when it is costing other people money.
there is a whole society out there outside raves and we are all still part of it and have to live within it.
Honestly, I’ve been to one party in the past few years whereby if the police have turned up there hasn’t been any sort of unecessary antagonism towards them. People don’t seem to realise that fighting the police only ends one way every time.
As we all (should) know, leaving a place as you found it leaves an infinately better impression than trashing everything in sight. Police tolerance, not to mention poor public opinion, definately won’t improve if stuff like this carries on eh..
to be fair East Anglian parties were once way better for looking after the party area compared to SE England, but they still had the issue about people being needlessly stubborn/antagonistic to the cops.
if people have last tunes early in the afternoon, even if the dog walkers do call the old bill it looks to them like everyones obeying the rule of law, and everyone goes home happy. That was how the old raves got left alone..
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Forums › Rave › Free Parties & Teknivals › Stop vandalism at parties
