Tag Archives: rape

Mar 26 2018

2017 Crime Scorecard

Crime Statistics for previous years:

2016   2015   2014   2013   2012

Thanks to Anonymous Burner who sent this in on January 1st – not a day I am usually reading much email, so it slipped through the cracks. Thank you for the reminder, and thanks to One Who Wants To Know for asking if I’d run out of things to complain about – sometimes a bit of motivation helps, particularly in these dark days of Facebook shadow-banning.

Pershing County are not the biggest fans of Burning Man, as you will see from the Lovelock Review-Miner article below. A quarter of the county’s population are incarcerated in the correctional facility, including (until just recently) OJ “The Juice” Simpson.

Most of the time, Pershing County is a safe place with a low crime rate. But in August and September, their crime rate spikes to amongst the worst in the country. Burners make the whole County look bad. Burners might think “well they should be happy to have us, we are great for the economy” but this is only true for Washoe County, where Reno is.

We used to be able to read about arrests at Burning Man in the Reno Gazette-Journal, but ever since they appointed  Jenny Kane (of Chocotaco scoop fame) as their dedicated Burning Man beat reporter, stories like this seem to get hushed up.

Pershing County smashed through all previous records with a whopping 179 arrests in August and September 2017. Other than FOIA, there is no way to tell how many were for Burners, but based on the average for the remaining months of 4.9 we can safely assume it is 97%.

2017 pershing county unified crime report

What sort of things were Burners getting up to? 1 forcible rape, 2 larceny (theft), 6 arson…the rest drugs – selling them, or possessing hard drugs. The Sheriff says they have confiscated guns from within Black Rock City and are concerned that the event organizers are not able to prevent guns coming in.

2017 pershing county crime types

Looks pretty safe for stoners, you’re more likely to get a citation than an arrest. Be careful, though: even though marijuana is legal in Nevada, Burning Man takes place on Federal land – and we all know how much Attorney General Jeff “Smoke” Sessions loves weed.

The Cannabist: Can You Bring Weed To Burning Man?

Pershing County wants more money to cover the costs, which they incur longer than just for the period the gates are open. In a case of Allen vs Allen, BMorg says “$182,221 is enough” – ie, stick it where the sun don’t shine, Sheriff!

Burning Man’s spin-meisters made the argument that the legalization of weed would lead to reduced costs for the Pershing County’s Sheriffs Office. Looks like the cops responded with a record number of arrests – almost quadruple last year’s record setting 46, which was up 600% on the year before.

Once again, BMorg tries to pinch pennies from the LEOs, and the LEOs take it out on the Burners. A familiar pattern by now in this decade-long dispute.

From the Lovelock Review Monitor, story by Debra Reid (emphasis ours):

BLM requests public input on Burning Man

Thursday, December 28, 2017 1:00 AM

Pershing County residents and other concerned citizens are reminded that January 15, 2018 is the Bureau of Land Management’s deadline for public comment on the Burning Man festival.

The BLM must gather public input as it prepares an Environmental Impact Statement on the event. The EIS is required before the agency can issue another ten year Special Recreation Permit for the festival in the spring of 2019. The current SRP expires after the 2018 festival.

Black Rock City LLC, organizer of the event, is requesting that the new SRP allow expansions beyond the current maximum of 70,000 paid participants to a maximum population from 80,000 to 100,000 people on the playa, including ticket-holders, staff, contractors and volunteers.

To accommodate the larger crowd, BRC is also asking the BLM to expand the closure area. Some of the festival’s main attractions are the burning of massive structures, including a giant wooden effigy during the climax of the event. One Burning Man participant died at the 2017 event after he broke through multiple lines of security and leaped into the conflagration.

Nudity and drugs are not uncommon, making the event controversial in a conservative, rural county. Urban areas in Washoe and Lyon County benefit economically from the event while Pershing County supplies much of the law enforcement, incarceration and other services.

The 2013 Comprehensive Festival Ordinance Waiver, Law Enforcement and Settlement Agreement between BRC and Pershing County limits BRC’s costs for county services according to event attendance and integrated versus separate law enforcement command.

The ten-year agreement has become an ongoing source of contention between county law enforcement and festival officials. Even as the festival expands in 2019 and beyond, law enforcement payments to the county are restricted until the agreement expires in 2023.

Pershing County Sheriff Jerry Allen contends that the festival requires year-round attention and much more than eight days of county law enforcement services due to accidents and crime that occur during the weeks of set up, tear down and clean up before and after the event.

BRC officials respond that law enforcement activities outside the eight day festival are not included in the settlement agreement and are part of the normal costs of county government.

BRC has refused to pay an invoice for $39,959.20 submitted to the county by Sheriff Allen for county law enforcement costs due to activities before and after the 2016 Burning Man event. BRC General Counsel Raymond Allen argued that those expenses were covered in a total payment to the county of $243,964.92, per the settlement agreement.

“The decision to allocate $182,221.83 to the Sheriff out of the total amount that BRC paid to the County in 2016 was an exercise of the County’s sole and absolute discretion under Section 4.1 of the Agreement and was presumably based on what the Commissioners determined to be the cost of supplying ‘reasonable law enforcement services needed’ for the 2016 event,” Ray Allen stated in a letter to the county. “If the Sheriff’s Office disagreed with the Commission and decided to spend more than the amount that was allocated by the Commission, that decision had no effect whatsoever on BRC’s payment obligations under the Agreement.”

Sheriff Allen and other county law enforcement officials say they have confiscated guns inside the festival and question the ability of BRC’s gatekeepers to keep weapons out of the event.

Now that recreational marijuana is legal in Nevada, that should reduce citations issued at the event, Burning Man Political Affairs Manager Marnee Benson said in a letter to the county.

“In 2016, 62 of the 152 PCSO citations issued in connection with the Burning Man event were for possession of less than an ounce of marijuana,” Benson stated in a February 1, 2017 letter.

“That is to say, 41 percent of Pershing’s citations were issued for conduct that is now legal in Nevada. We expect this will free up a significant amount of time and budget for PCSO in 2017.” [the arrest statistics for 2017 indicate otherwise – Ed.]

In his written comments on the event submitted to the BLM, Lovelock resident David Skelton said if Burning Man expands, it will be an increasing burden on Pershing County taxpayers.

“As Burning Man provides no economic benefit to Pershing County, to the contrary, if Burning Man left Pershing County and went elsewhere, there would then be an economic benefit, due to cost reduction,” Skelton said. “There are multiple locations the event can be held on either public or private lands outside of Pershing County.”

Written comments on the Burning Man SRP should be emailed by Jan. 15, 2018 to blm_nv_burningmaneis@blm.gov or mailed to the following address:

Attention: Burning Man Event SRP EIS

BLM Winnemucca District Office, 5100 E. Winnemucca Blvd., Winnemucca, NV 89445.

Dec 5 2013

Burning Man: Back to the Future

by Whatsblem the Pro

Or you can just sit there forever in your Rules-Royce, sucker

Or you can just sit there forever in your Rules-Royce, sucker


Whether the topic is children on the playa, cops on the playa, feathers on the playa, or just rules in general on the playa, burners are going to argue bitterly and at great length about it. Any time these topics are raised in any burner forum online, the conversation draws hundreds of comments, many of them aggressive to the point of abuse. It’s as though the desert fosters endless dispute in spite of all the groovy talk about togetherness and family and unity of purpose.

How can we resolve these seemingly unresolvable disagreements?

Consider the original reasons for going out to the Black Rock Desert in the first place; it was largely because the remoteness and harshness of the place made it a good place for a Temporary Autonomous Zone. It was a place where you could get your dog good and drunk and let him drive your car across the playa at 120MPH while you leaned out the passenger window, peppering the drive-by shooting range with buckshot. . . and there was nobody who could tell you with any authority that anything about that was wrong.

Ever since Larry Harvey and his gang co-opted that freedom by putting a fence around it and selling tickets, you aren’t even allowed to bring your dog, much less get him drunk. The speed limit is 5MPH, and firearms are frowned upon. . . because as everyone will tell you if you happen to lament those bygone days, the event is just too big for it to be practical to not have any rules. While that’s probably very true, it’s also true that without the fence and the tickets the event may very well have remained small enough for it to be OK. . . but I digress.

When the festivities on Baker Beach grew too large to avoid unwanted attention from the police, it became clear that San Francisco was no place for a Temporary Autonomous Zone of any size, as it would not and could not be tolerated by the locals. . . so, thanks to the Cacophony Society, a TAZ capable of supporting Burning Man as it existed in those days was established in the Black Rock Desert. Now Black Rock City itself is so big that the locals there balk at the idea of having no rules. . . so instead of discarding the best thing about the event in its early days, why aren’t we establishing a new TAZ to serve the needs of the woolier, more freedom-loving denizens of Black Rock City?

The obvious answer, of course, is that no matter what Larry Harvey or Marian Goodell say in speeches and press releases, Black Rock City LLC is a corporate business entity that exists for the purpose of making money, not for fostering anything too radical in the way of culture, and that purpose is inimical to the very idea of autonomy. The Disneyfication of the playa marches ever onward in the name of profits, and public relations problems are dealt with in the corporate way: by paying people off and covering things up. For example, I speculate that rape kits are not available at Burning Man, not because the environment is too harsh or the chain of custody being too difficult to maintain; but because having rape kits on the playa would mean that far more rapes at Burning Man would be reported, instead of shrugged off and forgotten about. Many rape victims would rather stay at Burning Man and quietly put the rape behind them than spend the rest of the burn in a Reno hospital talking to cops and doctors. In short, maybe we don’t have rape kits out there because it would hurt the corporate brand that the Org owns and profits from.

The profit motive is what brought us to this, and the profit motive has swollen the numbers of people attending to the point that most of them no longer have much in common with the free spirits that came to share their visions with each other in the early days of the event. At this late date, any proposal that suggests Burning Man might return to its origins of envelope-pushing freedom is immediately shouted down as unreasonable and unrealistic.

Imagine, though, a designated area on the playa – for waiver-signing adults only – with no rules. A place near enough to BRC to get to easily, but far enough away that gunfire isn’t a problem. A controlled-access TAZ. An anarchy park, within the confines of Burning Man. A place with no cops, no rules, and no limits.

Black Rock City can grow and grow, and so can the rules and the Disneyland-like aspects and the mandated safety and the numbers of children and the vast hordes of finger-pointers and burnier-than-thou shamers. . . and we’ll still have (we’ll once again have) a place to be ourselves, completely unfettered by anyone’s rules or expectations.

Comments are encouraged.