STARK RAVING MAD

Why Did Utah Police This Summer Storm A Harmless And Legal Rave With
Guns And Dogs, Terrorizing Partygoers? You Don't See Them Busting
Down The Gates At Nascar Races Or Concerts By Crosby, Stills And Nash.

Close to midnight on a Saturday evening late this summer, a police
helicopter crested over a ridge in a desert canyon near Salt Lake
City, descended into a low hover over a private ranch, and lit up the
area with floodlights. Below, about 1,000 young people were dancing
to electronic music at a legal, long-planned rave. They had no idea
the police in the sky were armed to teeth and had them surrounded.

Suddenly, cops on the ground stormed in to stop the whole thing.

About 90 uniformed officers, equipped with guns, dogs, Tasers and
tear gas, marched like a conquering army into the crowd.

They shut off the music and ordered people to leave; anyone who gave
them trouble -- anyone who merely asked what was going on -- was
dealt with harshly.

People in the crowd reported being brutalized, terrorized with guns,
dogs and other weapons.

A two-minute video of the event shot by a videographer named Jeff
Coombs shows officers surrounding selected members of the crowd,
forcefully pushing them to the ground, and arresting them.

Raves have been a cultural phenomenon for more than a decade.

The high-energy dance parties, both organized and improvised, have
taken place in countless places -- clubs, warehouses, rooftops,
ranches -- across the country without incident.

Yet raves clearly upset something in rural Utah. Utah County Sheriff
James Tracy says he broke up the rave to stop rampant drug use,
sexual abuse and dangerous health conditions. But in the month since
the raid, details have emerged in interviews with attendees, in press
reports and in court that vindicate the ravers and paint a disturbing
picture of excessive police force.

In August, rave organizer Brandon Fullmer filed suit against Tracy,
asking a federal court to prevent the Utah County sheriff and other
officials from closing down any future legal raves.

But despite his outrage over the sheriff's actions -- and the larger
outrage in the world beyond Utah -- it now appears that the
authorities in the county will face no trouble for the raid. County
officials have sided with Tracy and on Thursday a federal judge in
Salt Lake City denied the rave promoters' demand to enjoin the
sheriff from closing down any future legal raves in Utah County. "The
sheriff has essentially said that we don't want these kinds of
concerts in our county," says Brian Barnard, Fullmer's attorney.
"They don't want concerts for young people in our county -- they
don't want electronic music, kids hanging out all night long. It's a
prejudice and a fear of young people." Folks uninitiated in the rave
scene will be surprised by the logistical complexities involved in
putting on an all-night dance party for a couple thousand people.

A good rave with popular DJs and a great sound system requires the
kind of planning and attention to detail that would do a White House
advance team proud.

This is the sort of rave that Fullmer, a record-store manager and
veteran Salt Lake City party promoter, began planning in April, four
months before the event was to be held. Fullmer, who says he has put
on more than 100 parties during the past decade, thought of
everything. The venue he chose for his Aug. 20 rave, a 350-acre
parcel of land owned by local ranchers, is a prized location for
concerts. Set in a section of Spanish Fork Canyon called Diamond
Fork, it's far from any populated area, giving ravers a great deal of
space, and peace of mind, to dance, to make noise, to camp out, to
have fun. Because the party was to last all night -- attendees were
encouraged to bring their camping gear -- Fullmer outfitted the place
with a host of amenities to keep kids happy and safe. He rented
dozens of portable toilets and contracted with a team of security
guards and with Spanish Fork Ambulance, the local emergency medical
team, to staff the rave. Early in August, Fullmer applied for and was
granted a mass-gathering permit for the rave from the Utah County
Health Department.

Most important, Fullmer saw to the music.

He hired a team of stagehands and audio technicians -- there would be
two simultaneous stages -- and assembled a line-up of drum 'n' bass
stars from around the world, including DJ Craze, from Miami;
Seattle's DJ Syze; Spor, from London; and Atlanta's Evol Intent.
Fullmer began selling tickets at his record store for $15 (tickets
purchased at the gates were $25); he called the rave Versus II, a
kind of sequel to a previous rave he'd organized -- only, his
advertisement promised, three times better.

In the weeks leading up to the rave, while Fullmer carried out plans
for the event, Sheriff Tracy set his sights on disrupting it. Tracy
is suspicious of raves; he says they are a breeding ground for drug
and alcohol use, for sexual assaults on women, and for violence of other kinds.

This is not, he insists, just an idle belief on his part -- Tracy
says previous raves within his jurisdiction have caused just this
sort of trouble, so when he became aware of Versus II, he knew the
crowd would be up to no good. Versus II opened its gates at around 9
p.m. on Saturday evening.

In the three hours before the cops burst in, between 800 and 1,000
people streamed into the place.

According to several members in the crowd, there were no sexual
assaults or violent incidents of any sort. Mark Byers, one of the
half-dozen emergency medical service officers present, attests that
there were no health problems.

Security personnel at the gates did search ravers as they came in,
and according to Fullmer, various types of contraband were
confiscated. The rave then uncoiled as planned -- lights pulsed,
music blared across the canyon, and people danced.

Tracy, though, had no eye for the entertainment. He had inserted
undercover personnel in the crowd, and in the three hours after the
gates opened, he says, the agents made five purchases of illegal
substances. Drugs were all over the rave, he says, and so he decided
to act. He called in the helicopters and ground troops.

For ravers in the crowd, the first sign that anything was amiss came
with the lights of a chopper cresting over a nearby ridge. "It gets
to be about 11:30 and we all see this light coming from over the
mountains and it gets closer and closer," Ashley Hawker, Fullmer's
girlfriend, described in an e-mail. "Then it starts shining its light
on the entire crowd.

That's when I look to my right and ... I see a guy dressed in all
green camo and carrying a gun and wearing a helmet.

I thought my eyes had deceived me but following right behind him are
more big green men carrying fully automatic guns. My whole body
starts shaking uncontrollably." Many ravers emphasized the speed with
which the police descended; one minute, everything appeared normal,
and the next minute, the crowd was surrounded by uniformed men with
guns. "It was a military siege," says Jessica Riley, a 25-year-old
raver and student at Humboldt State University who attended the party
that night. "The light is sweeping all over the ground, and there are
all these kids standing there trying to figure out what is going on.
The quickness shook a lot of people." Bewildered as they were, many
ravers immediately began to document the raid. "Every single kid with
a camera and a phone pulled it out and started taking pictures,"
Riley says. The move seems to have infuriated the cops. On Coombs'
video, you can hear the officers yelling at him to turn off his
camera, and on a discussion page documenting personal accounts from
the raid, several people say they witnessed kids getting attacked by
the cops for refusing to give up their cameras.

Once they were among the crowd, officers directed people toward the
exits -- sometimes refusing to allow them to pack up their camping
gear -- and began to deal harshly with anyone who resisted.

Alaisha Matagi, a 24-year-old woman in the crowd, later posted online
that when an officer "in full army attire" told her to leave, she
asked, "What's going on?" "At which point I was brutally attacked,"
she wrote. "Thrown to the ground and in the scuffle punched in the
face by SWAT. That was not it either.

I suppose I posed some threat as another SWAT member rushed over to
subdue me to the ground putting his knee in my back and arresting me.
At that point I am screaming to a patron 'what's going on?' He is
just as confused as I am. At that point another SWAT member came over
and kicked me in the leg. Let me tell you that I also only weigh 130 pounds.

I had three grown men attack and beat me and throw me to ground for
absolutely no reason at all. Not to mention being dragged to a van
and violently being tossed in and taken to jail. Fined for resisting
arrest and another outrageous charge [failure to obey police]."
Matagi's account is supported by Coombs' video -- she's the woman in
the red-hooded sweatshirt being held to the ground by many officers
- -- as well as by several witnesses who spoke to Salon.

In interviews and on message boards, other ravers described
additional instances of harsh tactics by the police.

Some people say tear gas was used; others say Taser weapons were
drawn and fired.

Several in the crowd point out that in infrared footage of the scene
shot from the police helicopter that night, an officer in the air can
be heard directing officers on the ground to fire a Taser at some people.

And virtually everyone who spoke to Salon said they saw officers
drawing and pointing automatic weapons at ravers, and that this
tactic really freaked people out. Heath McBee, who owns an audio firm
called Euphoric Beats and was handling the sound that evening, says
he was resting on a cot in his truck when officers slammed open his
doors and began yelling at him to shut the music down. "I woke up to
an M-16 pointed at me," McBee says, like nothing he'd ever seen in
nine and a half years of working raves.

The sheriff says the ravers are mistaken. "We don't have any M-16s,"
Tracy says. He acknowledges that officers at the rave did have Taser
weapons as well as tear gas and either sidearm pistols or rifles, but
that equipment is standard issue for all police officers, he insists.
"It would be no different if a guy got stopped on the road." And even
though officers carried those weapons, they didn't use them, the
sheriff says. In a couple of instances officers pointed but did not
fire their Tasers, according to Tracy; but he says he's aware of no
instances in which officers pointed guns or used tear gas.

Tracy also defends the officers' practice of surrounding ravers and
pushing them to the ground, as we see them doing to Matagi in the
Coombs video. "That's standard procedure," Tracy says. "What we do is
take them to the ground, wrestle them till we get their hands.

Now you see a guy with a knee on her back and you ask why you need to
do that. But officers have been shot and killed and stabbed by people
who weighed 90 pounds and were actively resisting arrest." Tracy says
the takedown procedure was used sparingly -- just two or three times
- -- that night.

Not only does Tracy believe his officers acted with restraint, he
also says that his decision to shut down the party can be seen, in
retrospect, as wise. Many drugs were confiscated at the party, he
says, and of the 30 or so people arrested that night -- most for
disobeying or resisting officers -- a handful were charged with possession.

The rave promoters say Tracy's drug argument is bogus.

They say the bulk of the contraband was in possession of the security
guards, who had confiscated it from the crowd.

Tracy doesn't buy the story.

The security guards' possession of drugs was still illegal, he says,
as they should have notified police of the contraband as soon as they
discovered it. Tracy also says that he personally found drugs as he
walked around the grounds after the raid." I picked up a bag off the
ground," he says. Tracy says he found marijuana, cocaine, Ecstasy,
methamphetamines and mushrooms. "For the size of area we picked those
up in, I consider that a large amount." The sheriff claims ravers
were dangerously high. One woman -- whom Tracy did not name -- was
found to be close to overdosing on Ecstasy, with a resting pulse rate
of 176. But Tracy's claims have been difficult to verify: The woman
he cites was not sent to a hospital; she was allowed to go home to
her parents. Indeed, an investigation into the health situation at
the rave yields cloudy results.

Byers, one of the ambulance personnel, tells Salon that no medical
people saw any signs of danger regarding the health conditions at the
rave. Asked whether anyone at the medical booth had heard reports of
overdosing kids at the rave before the cops came in, Byers says,
"None that we're aware of -- nothing that anyone reported to us."

In an affidavit filed with a federal court after Fullmer sued Tracy,
the medical people at the party appeared to reverse their story.

They said that in fact they were concerned that drug use could cause
heart attacks among people at the rave. It's unclear why the two
stories diverge -- ambulance personnel could not be reached for
further questions on the matter. In any case, other rave experts who
were present -- including Jonathan Meader, the Salt Lake City
coordinator for DanceSafe, a national organization that promotes
healthy conditions at dance parties -- say Versus II was
well-managed. Meader says he'd rank it as being "one of the
higher-caliber parties" in terms of safe conditions for partiers.
Fullmer and other ravers argue that police violently overreacted in
shutting down the event.

If Tracy had talked to them about his concerns before police busted
in, they would have tried to accommodate him, they insist.

They say that his reluctance to do so suggests a cultural bias; you
can find drugs at virtually any public event, from NASCAR to a Stones
concert, but only at a rave do cops think they have carte blanche to
storm in with choppers and tear gas. "My reaction is that this is not
justification to close down a concert," says Barnard, Fullmer's
attorney. "My guess is that at any large concert of young people's
music there is a going being smoking in the bathroom, marijuana
exchanging hands in the facility.

The mere fact that criminal conduct occurs by an individual patron
does not justify shutting down the venue. If people are passing a
joint down the row at a Crosby, Stills and Nash concert, that does
not justify sending storm troopers in to close the concert." Now that
a federal judge has rejected Barnard's argument, it's not clear what
recourse ravers have. Many say they will now feel unsafe at raves --
fearful of the cops. Ravers still plan to organize -- to protest
against and to document police misconduct online -- but they worry
that the public won't rally behind their case. "I think it's a
cultural thing," says Meader of DanceSafe. "The Utah cops are saying,
'Our way of life is right.

Yours isn't.'"