RAVE FANS ACROSS NATION, ONLINE WEIGH IN ON RACINE CRACKDOWN

They Complain Party-Goers Were Ticketed For Merely Attending

Racine - The buzz on the Net is Racine.

Police citations written to 441 people for attending a rave? What! From
Washington state to Washington, D.C., you can almost hear the e-mails and
newsgroup postings whizzing by.

"When there's word of something like this, it spreads pretty quick,"
Madison, Ill., rave promoter Jeff Lofink said in an interview Monday. He'd
seen postings about the Racine rave bust on www.stlouisraver.com,
www.hallucination.com and in various Internet newsgroups.

"Usually, you have to be doing something wrong to get a ticket," Lofink
said, explaining why some people are upset.

His impression of Racine?

A place "where the police don't follow the laws too much, where they feel
they can overstep their bounds."

The Police Department certainly has come under fire, albeit mostly from
teenagers and young adults who attend rave parties, where "electronic
music" has found a home. The national criticism, some officials say, may be
unfair.

When the Racine County Sheriff's Department raided a rave in Yorkville, it
did what many law enforcement agencies have done: break up the party and
write citations to the party organizers.

That's a far cry from the 441 citations - at $968 apiece - that Racine
police wrote to everyone attending a Nov. 2 rave near downtown.

But the Yorkville rave was six or seven years ago, Sheriff William
McReynolds said, before local authorities had any indication that rave
parties were virtually synonymous with the illegal use of drugs, usually
Ecstasy.

"I think the Police Department was looking at a whole different situation,"
the sheriff said.

Journal Sentinel reporters attended a rave in late April at the Alliant
Energy Center of Madison and found much the same thing. Ecstasy seemed to
be the main attraction that night among the crowd of 3,000. About
two-thirds of the young people who were asked acknowledged using the drug,
and some said they bought it there.

The use of Ecstasy is skyrocketing nationwide. A recent report from the
U.S. Department of Justice indicated that emergency room personnel had seen
a 500% increase in patients on the drug in the six years ending in 1999. It
is now considered the fastest-growing drug problem in Wisconsin.

However, rave fans on the Internet think it was outrageous that merely
attending the Racine party resulted in getting a citation for being an
"inmate of a disorderly house/controlled substances."

Pointing out that only three people at the party were arrested on drug
charges, they said in interviews that they're spreading word about the
Racine bust, in part, to be prepared if the tactic is used elsewhere.

"There's just this misconception that we're the only ones doing (drugs),"
said Mike Phillips, 26, of suburban Washington, D.C. "I go because I like
the music. You can't punish the people that are going for the right reasons
because of the ones that are going (for drugs)."

Phillips and others who discuss the Racine bust and other rave issues over
the Internet said they had never heard of police writing citations to
party-goers. They said Racine police probably cracked down hard so that no
raves would be held in the city in the future - and that the technique
probably was effective.

City officials have acknowledged that they want to deter future parties,
even as the city attorney's office has made plea bargains. Last week, those
cited who pleaded no contest to the "inmate/controlled substances" citation
were fined only $100. And on Monday, when the second wave of ravers made
their initial court appearance, those who pleaded no contest received the
lower fine and had their citation changed to disorderly conduct, with no
reference to controlled substances.

But the city still faces the potentially costly prospect of having to hire
a special prosecutor and pay police overtime for hundreds of trials. In
numbers similar to last week, 94 of the 139 who appeared in court Monday
pleaded not guilty, 28 did not appear and only 17 took the plea bargain.

Police in Racine were suckered by the "corporate sensational media," which
make it seem that every rave is rife with illegal drug use, said Jon
Gibson, 23, of Vancouver, Wash. The crackdown will only create more danger,
he said, because rather than being held in bars, raves will go back to
being held underground.

That would be a shame, said Dave Meeker of Chicago, director of The
Selekta, an organization that supports electronic music deejays, promoters
and producers. As rave parties have become more public, they have increased
security and searches at the door, he said.

"I don't know how many times I've seen drug dealers pushed out the door and
their drugs flushed down the toilet" without police needing to intervene,
Meeker said.

Others who have gotten involved in the Racine bust aren't fighting for the
right to party, necessarily, but to preserve civil liberties.

Amy Tyler, host of a daily talk show on KTBB-AM in Houston, said she had
discussed the Racine case several times last week because she and her
listeners view the raid as a misuse of police power.

"Government has just gotten away with too much for too long, and it's time
we started fighting back," Tyler said.