Something that BMorg are always attempting to hush up are the details of the annual arrests. It used to be reported every year in the Reno Gazette-Journal, but since they appointed dedicated Burning Man beat reporter Jenny Kane that type of coverage has stopped. We have to try to piece the information together however we can.

I filed a FOIA request in January to get the 2017 arrest data from the Pershing County Sheriff’s Office, but so far they haven’t even acknowledged it. Thanks very much to our source DS who sent us the 2015, 2016, and some 2017 information below. The information we received includes the names of all people arrested in 2015 and 2017 and what they were charged with, compiled from the local paper. Don’t panic! We won’t be publishing the names. We hope to get more 2017 information soon.

The official reports confirm a shockingly large number of sexual assaults – 15 in 2015, 11 in 2016 – and way more missing children than were previously reported. The rapes, not prosecuted; the children (thankfully) all found. No wonder BMorg wanted this hushed up. Sexual offenders who fail to register are a recurring problem. Kidnapping, attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, domestic violence, jailbreaks, and celebrities with armed bodyguards are all issues at Black Rock City. Don’t think that just because you’re “home”, that means you are safe – and don’t think for a moment that having a rule “no guns” means there are no guns there.

In fact, the Sheriff specifically states that he does not believe he can provide for the safety of Burners.

Image: Steemkr

BMorg vs PCSO

This has been an ongoing battle for many years. The cops think they should get more money as the festival gets bigger and goes for longer, BMorg thinks they should keep all the money for themselves to give to artists and make the world a better place. BMorg has big lawyers and political clout, they tell the Sheriff where to stick it, so to meet the budget required the Sheriff’s Office feels compelled to arrest and cite more Burners – to make their side of the argument stronger. “Look at all these criminals, our budget’s not big enough!”. Burners who pay $500-$1200 a ticket are thus used as pawns in an argument that people with $40 million per year of ticket money are having with local officials over 50 grand.

Pershing County normally has a population of approximately 6,800 people within the County.  This population includes approximately 1,600 inmates incarcerated at the [gated community of the] Lovelock Correctional Center.  For this population, the Pershing County Sheriff’s Office has 13 full time Sworn Law Enforcement Deputies, including the Sheriff, to perform all of the duties statutorily mandated for the Sheriff’s Office.  This equates to approximately 1 Deputy for every 400 persons permanently residing in Pershing County, minus those incarcerated. 

During the approximate 10-12 days of the active portion of the Burning Man Festival, the population of just the Festival balloons to upwards of 80,000+ persons.  Still with only the 13 Sworn Full-Time Deputies within the Pershing County Sheriff’s Office.  Based on this population, it would appear the Pershing County Sheriff’s Office would need to have approximately 200 Deputies to provide similar staffing for the visitors to the Burning Man Festival. However, Burning Man provides approximately 800+ ‘Black Rock Rangers’.  These employees of Burning Man are mostly made up of volunteers, some of whom have very limited training, to interact with the population and attempt to mitigate issues before they rise to the level of a Law Enforcement Response.  Some of the Rangers are trained enough to provide a force multiplication, to a limited extent, for Law Enforcement. 

The Problem, In a Few Charts

2015 Report – Highlights

• 1 death before the event
• 15 sexual assaults reported
• sex offender failed to register
• 6 children went missing – all found
• incident with nude man and his nude 4 year old child at adult event
• 1 arrest for kidnapping
• celebrities bringing armed bodyguards
• an inmate tried to escape from the temporary jail
• event ran for 9 days, previous discussions were around 7
• big load on Sheriff’s office while construction/tear down happening
• year end load processing all criminal cases, court dates etc
• “the comradery [sic] which was built during this event will extend through the state” – from cops, Feds, agencies working together
• integration with Humboldt Medical Team, who were kicked out for CrowdRX

You are more likely to get a citation from the BLM than the Pershing County Sheriff’s Office. The cops issued 143 citations and 175 verbal warnings. That makes 677 citations total for 2015, plus 43 arrests

2015 Sheriff’s Report:

2016 Sheriff’s Report – Highlights

The Sheriff actually says that after consulting with “entities” about Burning Man’s ability to deal with a critical incident like a mass casualty event, the results were “extremely dismal” and that he cannot in good conscience provide adequate safety to citizens attending the event.

9 people including Burning Man organization employees were arrested on the site before the event began, charged with “possessing trafficking levels of narcotics”

Other highlights

• 46 arrrests (43 in 2015)
• 152 citations (+326 BLM, total 478)
• sex offenders failing to register
• 11 sexual assaults reported
  • 1 arrest on playa
  • 2 reports after the festival, after victim returned to Reno and went to hospital for treatment – started by Reno PD
• several reports of missing or lost children – not just the single Amber Alert we were told about, that closed exodus for 8 hours

2016 Sheriff’s Report

2016 Burning Man Response

Someone has posted a highly accurate Craigslist Job ad. Hat tip to @defango for this.

Burning Man Camp Lead (Black Rock Dessert) 

• Principals only. Recruiters, please don’t contact this job poster.
• do NOT contact us with unsolicited services or offers
• OK to highlight this job opening for persons with disabilities

Image: Akufuncture

About a quarter of all sites on the World Wide Web run on WordPress, a phenomenal achievement from Billionaire 2 commas Burner Matt Mullenweg – although it is eclipsed by Burning Man chief technology guru Brian Behlendorf’s Apache which is running 38.2% of the Web (Jan 2018).

Anyone using WordPress should check out the plugin Steempress, which I’ve just installed here. Everything we post at Burners.Me will automatically get shared on Twitter, Facebook, and on the blockchain forever via Steemit.

Censorship and the “Internet 3” idea of paying you to use the software instead of stealing your data for advertisers is driving many people away from the “Internet 2” social media platforms. Steemit is the best of the new ones, and stories of people making more than $10,000 there just from posting, liking and sharing are now common. In 2 years one blogger made more than $127,000 and popular YouTuber #truther Titus Frost has made around $36,500. I’m not quite in their league, with around $420 in the last 6 months, but I am enjoying the uncensored platform and the friendly community there.

Speaking of smart, friendly, and tech-savvy community [drink!]…It’s 2018, why haven’t BMorg embraced crypto yet? Larry said they would when asked about it in 2013.

Steemit is the new Facebook, and Presearch is the new Google. We’ve also added the Sharpay sharing button. Just by sharing stories from here, you can now earn cryptocurrency. Gifting, meet Decommodification. Radical Self Reliance, meet Radical Self Expression. Communal Effort…well, you get my drift. It’s an economy without money, based on goodness and liking and sharing! We’re making the world a better place, and if we don’t succeed, at least everyone got paid while it happened. Internet 3 is the opposite concept of volunteerism or surveillance capitalism.

Follow me on Steemit, Twitter, and YouTube

Live today at 6:30pm PST. Tune in via this page.

Re-blogged from Reinvent.Net

We also talked about Stewart before in The New Communalists and The Greatest Cultural Movement of Our Time. If there is an award for mastermind of Silicon Valley, I nominate him. Here’s what he said about Burning Man:

Burning Man, they have surpassed in every way the various things we were attempting with the Acid Tests and the Trips Festival, Burning Man has realized with such depth and thoroughness and ongoing originality and ability to scale and minimalist rules, but enough rules that you can function, and all the things we were farting around with, Larry Harvey has really pulled off. I don’t think that would have come to pass without going through whatever that spectrum of the ’60s was, the prism of the ’60s, the spectrum of bright colors that we espoused for a while. It all got exacerbated by the Internet and sequence of computer-related booms, but I think it flavored a whole lot of the basic nature of Burning Man. Its Hellenism was replaced by Hellenistic Period, driven out by Alexandria and that was basically better. I think that’s to some extent true in this case.

Stanford counterculture professor Fred Turner (a Burner) asked Stewart about Self-Reliance Sufficiency:

Stewart gets a few mentions in our look last year on the 50th anniversary of the Human Be-in at the Bay Area’s counter-cultural legacy:

I mentioned these characters in CryptoBeast episode #2 and Short Bus Physics With Quinn and J.Go. Jason Goodman is in cahoots with the one-eyebrowed Sith Lord Quinn Michaels, who says that there is a giant underground city under Burning Man and the weight of the people on the earth is causing the planet to change its rotation. He is playing a LARP called #tyler, and Jason is most likely part of Project UAREHERE – as I discussed in Shadow History part 7.

Since then I am firmly on Team @DaveActon (he did apologize publicly for cyber-harrassing Nathan from Lift The Veil). Dave has just sued cinema verité pseudo-journalist Jason Goodman over the worst thing that has ever happened on YouTube, which is when LARPers caused one of the busiest seaports in the world to be shut down for 8 hours over the threat of a “dirty bomb made from uranium” – which is not possible, according to the Wikipedia page on dirty bombs.

Here are the public court documents from PACER:

If you don’t know about this case, you can read about it in the New York Times or watch it on CNN. You can also see it as it unfolded live on their stream, which for some reason is still permitted to be up on YouTube.

We wish Dave every success in his endeavor, and thank him for doing this to help protect US cyber security and the integrity of the YouTube #truth community.

Could it be that Zionism and Nazism both came from the same place? Was Anti-Semitism invented by these same people as a weaponized form of social engineering?

Scholar, independent researcher and semi-retired tech entrepreneur Joe Atwill joins scholar, independent researcher and semi-retired tech entrepreneur Steve Outtrim for a look into the mysterious research lodge Quatuor Coronati and its role in world history. John Yarker’s Masonic initiation of both Aleister Crowley and Helena Blavatsky is discussed, as is the connections between Montagu Norman and Theosophy, and Blavatsky and Hitler’s occult backers the Thule Society. We look into the Masonic and Black Nobility banking origins of Zionism, Theosophy, Nazism and Anti-Semitism.

Following on from the news that Dave “Acton” Sweigert sued The Mouth That Roared Jason Goodman in South Carolina court…

The plaintiff has filed a significantly amended complaint.

Perhaps adding fuel to the fire of rumors that Dave Acton Sweigert and George Webb Sweigert are the same person, Dave has chosen to file in court as “D. George Sweigert”. He is demanding a jury trial. The Exhibits share some of the mainstream media coverage of the port shutdown and his own credentials as a Homeland Security Critical Infrastructure expert. 

The significant development in this claim is the involvement of an FBI contract informant in the Crowdsourced LARP. Is that why nobody got in trouble for shutting a whole port down from a YouTube livestream?

The informant in question is allegedly Okey Marshall Richards, Jr, who has gone by the aliases “Deep Uranium”, “Rock Hudson”, and “Mr Hudson” in about 30 YouTube shows with these operatives. The “MidWest Conspiracy Theorist” is presumably the plaintiff’s brother George Webb. Webb has claimed to be part of “old Mossad” with many global intelligence connections, including a friendship with #pizzagate accused James Alefantis. George Webb is no stranger to FBI informants either, having written an Op-Ed about them for North Star Post in 2015 before launching his crowdsourced journalism career.

[via Tracking the Leopard Meroz]

Then there is Goodman himself:

Found it! Jason Goodman of Crowdsource the Truth admits to dropping off "evidence packages" to the FBI.

Extra interesting considering the guy who advised Jason to execute the Charleston Dirty Bomb Hoax is a long-time FBI informant too

#TruthLeaks #TimePhoneHack #cstt #awan pic.twitter.com/QRGo7rui5u

— Hoax Wars (@HoaxWars) April 26, 2018

There are an awfully large number of FBI connections to this operation. In that context, is this a coincidence?

You can find the public court documents for yourself on PACER.

Sweigert vs Goodman (South Carolina) 2:18-cv-01633

Steele vs Goodman (Virginia – Eastern) 3:17-cv-601 

Dave Sweigert has also made 7 separate filings (so far) in support of Robert David Steele’s lawsuit , detailing some of his own harassment and defamation by this gang. His filing address is Greenbrae, Marin County.

54
55
56
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Goodman, who appears to be representing himself as pro se defendant and claims he’s a journalist because “anyone can be a journalist just like anyone can be a photographer”, has filed a number of motions to dismiss Steele’s suit as frivolous…but so far the case continues.

Goodman has also responded by having the Becks (of the fatal DNC lawsuit fame) on his show to discuss “Litigation as a weapon of mass destruction”.

Burning Man’s former Social Alchemist Bear Kittay shares his memories of Larry Harvey, as well as some insight into how Larry’s crowning achievement of a permanent, year-round Philosophy Center came together.

Guest Post by Bear Kittay

Original Burner Kal Spelletich is getting evicted from his warehouse, and is raising funds to help him move his massive collection of robots, hardware and tools. Kal was the first to bring robots and flamethrowers to Burning Man. Given this years I, Robot theme, you’d think the Org could assist. Donate here.

Re-blogged from https://www.gofundme.com/save-kals-robots

I’m getting evicted from my warehouse studio. I urgently need your help to raise $10K to relocate in the next month. I’ve hand built hundreds of robots, fire machines, and held jaw dropping events in the past 25 years in the warehouse. This is where I built the first ever flamethrowers and robots used at Burning Man in the ’90’s. I hosted music, noise and art events with the likes of the Bicycle Rodeo, Mitch Altman, Matt Heckert of Survival Research Laboratories, Heather Dewey-Hagborg to name a few and exhibitions with and for many many other artists and art groups (more below).

I ran my studio as an experimental art/live space that housed and supported over 100 other artists and activists. All with NO grants, no outside support, no gallery sales and no renting to tech businesses. In 1995 when I moved in the street was dirt and littered with abandoned cars and homeless everywhere, prostitution rings and  crack-heads lurking to rob you.
It was the project that should have never worked: an artist supporting artists by sharing below market rent.
Yet the 25 year run of people, events, exhibits are a testament to art over commerce.
Now, like virtually all other artists in San Francisco, I’m getting evicted.
I will keep making art. I will keep supporting others who make art and are active for change.
Sincere thanks from the bottom of my heart for any support you can offer.
It has been a gift to share my space with so many amazing people. I’m looking ahead to how I can keep doing this for the next 25 years.

BACKSTORY
Rented way back in 1995, my space is was one of the last remaining raw warehouse art spaces and I made it into a home for experimental, non commercial art. I hosted jaw-dropping, fire spewing, ear shattering robot performances, music, noise and art events with the likes of Chris Johanson, Johanna Jackson, Marie Lornez and her epic boat, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Matt Heckert.

I held numerous events like a mayoral fundraiser for the Green Party, art exhibits, housed visiting artists, when countless friends were getting evicted during the first dot-com I supported multiple people in distress, supported homeless folks giving food, sustenance, supplies and more,  writers, dancers, painters and activists; provided emergency art storage and live / work studios way way under market rates.
I did all this without grants or outside support.

No trust funds, patrons or high paying side jobs here. I passed along the cheap rent.

I provided housing and studios for countless artists, freaks, traveling activists and radical journalists like Trevor Paglen, AC Thompson, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, worked on Survival Research Laboratories shows, and countless others.
My life and warehouse were the inspiration for Rudy Rucker’s sci-fi novel Realware.  Another book that wouldn’t have happened without my warehouse is Streetopia.

Here’s some of what I’ve accomplished in the 25 years of working steadily in one place:

As seen on the Discovery Channel  this past year, I built some 16’ tall mind-reading Robots with Mitch Altman

OMG I was in the New York Times  ! Thrice!

Here I am waxing poetically  in a short doc with some shots of the studio I am losing.

PBS

140K views, this  was listed as the most dangerous art in the world in an article:

This  was done by some college students that went on to win awards and launch their careers.

I was the first to bring robots  and flamethrowers  to  Burning Man.

For more see here:
https://kaltek.wordpress.com/pressmedia/

This moment is uniquely busy: I am creating pieces for my first museum show at St. Mary’s College Art Museum in Moraga, CA in 2019 and a concurrent solo show at Catherine Clark Gallery in San Francisco.

Over the past two months since getting the notice to get out, I have undergone massive upheaval.

Over the past 38 years I’ve built momentum. Losing this is NOT an option.

REQUEST
I’m asking for $10K.

$50K, including payments in-kind (temporary workshop and storage) so far, is my minimum to keep going; to relocate some of my tools and all of my projects to a new permanent studio space and get robot storage as soon as possible.

In-kind payments from friends already: a temporary workshop, temporary storage for some of my work  and referrals to a tenant’s rights lawyer.

I’ve been awarded a spot at the Stochastic Labs to work on my artificial organ project this summer.

And I sort of have a live space.

NEED BREAKDOWN
– Move out: debris boxes, rental truck, labor, hauling $20K

– Permanent storage: a barn or a shipping container and/or a space to park it in the Greater Bay Area (another payment in kind opportunity!) $10K

– Lawyers fees: $10K (and up)

With another $10K I can breathe a sigh of relief as far as paying MORE lawyers (ugg), more moving & hauling costs, outfitting new workspace, overhead for long term  storage (some robots are BIG), and  preparing for upcoming exhibits in the Fall of 2018 and all of 2019 (some of the best opportunities of my career).

RISKS AND CHALLENGES
My entire art career has been a risk and a challenge. I’m on year 38 as an artist.

I’m working to make everything fall into place to keep momentum for the next couple of years—some of the most important in my life.

A main concern is my old, tired body. Formerly broken fingers and limbs – my art wounds- flare up now and then. One is nothing without their health.

Sorting through and moving 25 years of equipment and materials on my own is a major challenge.

There’s always a risk with a renter’s lawsuit. It could lose and if it does it’s possible I could be sued for a lot more than I have ever made or will ever make in the rest of my life. Much more than I’m asking for right now.

From my activist work, organizing marches, prop making and self survival and safety in violent confrontations with power, to traveling the world showing and making art, in India, Africa, all over the U.S. and Europe the 25 years in this space have been spectacular, as an artist,  not going to stop, ever, this I know. The challenge is to keep that momentum moving forward at this stressful and critical juncture.

——————
Karl Marx was right, Capitalism doesn’t work without gaming private property!

I never gamed this art space, never rented to tech bros or overcharged tenants. Some said I was a fool, I just did what I hoped someone would do for me.
————–

ABOUT ME
For 38 years, Kal has been exploring the interface of humans and robots, using technology to put people back in touch with real-life experiences. His work is interactive, requiring participants to enter or operate his pieces, often against their instincts of self-preservation. He probes the boundaries between fear, control and exhilaration by giving his audience the opportunity to operate and control fascinating and often dangerous machinery.

Born and raised in Davenport, Iowa, the seventh of nine children. He has an undergraduate degree from the University of Iowa, and an M.F.A. from The University of Texas at Austin, both in the field of Media Art. He has performed, exhibited and lectured worldwide, collaborating with scientists, musicians, and politicians. Spelletich’s work has been included in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions over the past three decades, including the De Young Museum, SFMOMA, The Exploratorium Museum and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, S.F., Ca., California Folk Art Museum, L.A., CA, Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA, and Headlands Center for the Arts, Marin, CA. He has exhibited internationally in Namibia, India, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, Croatia, France, Czech Republic, Holland, England, Slovakia and Austria. Spelletich lives and works in San Francisco, California.

In 2019 his work will be shown in a solo museum exhibit at St. Mary’s College of Art Museum in Orinda, CA, and a concurrent solo exhibit at the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, CA as well as other shows.

Towards the end of last year, we heard about a big case – one that dealt with issues that Burners who create Black Rock City have had for many years with the organization that collects the money and *ahem* saves it for future roadworks. Here’s a similarly themed protest from 2007:

It doesn’t seem like things have changed much in 11 years. BMorg’s attitude seems to always have been “DPW are volunteers, they can leave any time they want, they should be grateful we give them some food and money and social cachet”.

So what happened with this case?

The only media coverage I saw was in the Reno Gazette-Journal, first from 10-year volunteer Jessica Reeder:

In 2014, it all changed. The event was growing faster than the crew. The work got too hard, the days too long, and collectively, many of the crew realized we wanted to “gift” a little less of our sanity and health. A member of my crew started organizing for labor rights.

Burning Man, to its credit, improved working conditions somewhat. It started feeding laborers for the full season, for example, and instituted a transparent structure for those who do get paychecks. However, the company still “encourages volunteerism,”  asks workers to camp in the dirt for months — and last year, fired the crew member who was suggesting we unionize.

My coworker took his case to the National Labor Relations Board. In a settlement last month, Burning Man compensated him for lost wages, and notified the entire workforce of their right to fair treatment under the law. That’s not an admission of guilt, but it also doesn’t indicate innocence. My coworker was not the first to agitate for better working conditions; and whether it’s coincidental or not, the people who complained did not tend to keep their jobs.

It’s shocking to consider that Burning Man, a people-oriented nonprofit, would do anything other than invest in the health and happiness of its workforce. As a company whose strength is its people, I hope Burning Man will take the lead in treating its crew like a valuable resource, instead of continuing to expect them to “gift” their own lives and well-being.

[Source]

The story is not exactly critical of BMorg. Still, it was quickly followed up by another op-ed in the same paper by Joanne Fahnestock

I’m not sure where to begin in my response to Jessica Reeder’s column about Burning Man doing right by its volunteers (“Is 2018 the year Burning Man starts doing right by its workers?,” Jan. 14.)

The obvious first would be: What is the National Labor Relations Board doing getting involved with a volunteer? “Volunteer” says it all. You do not get paid and you can leave whenever you want. If someone wants to change that, it certainly should not occur while you’re accepting the position of volunteer worker.

I agree, the conditions at Burning Man are brutal — hot during the day, cold at night and windy and dusty all the time. You bring your own food, shelter and water. This is all made very clear at the start.

And if it was not clear to you when you signed up, it would be apparent as soon as you got there. You can leave at any time. There is no contract, no obligation. You stay or
you don’t.

One of the 10 principles of Burning Man is gifting time, energy, money, kindness. And it does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value. Clearly this is a misunderstood principle that neither the workers who filed the complaint, the ones trying to organize or the National Labor Relations Board comprehend.

I have been going to Burning Man for over 10 years and I gift my time. I do not expect anything in return. It is an experience I cannot begin to describe to anyone who has not been there. I expect nothing from the Burning Man Organization. I get so much more than they could possibly give me in dollars.

And when I choose to no longer go to Burning Man, I won’t go.

Doing the right thing is living by the 10 principles. Some are easier than others, but they are always voluntary.

[Source]

I wonder if this preachy person has any idea what it is like in the weeks and months leading up to Burning Man, building Black Rock City. Burning Man is hard enough with free pancakes and carcass washing, spare a thought for the people that are laboring long days in the sun and dust constructing things without any of that infrastructure being available to them.

There were no comments to either of these stories, although the case did draw some commentary from long-time Carson City critic Guy W Farmer. There were a few complaints about the obvious shill story on Reddit:

[Source]

There is some further discussion at this other r/BurningMan thread about the class divide between paid and unpaid workers and the rich tech bro clientele putting $12 million cash in the Org’s bank.

Jessica Reeder’s original story links to the National Labor Relations Board case information, which doesn’t shed much light:

BMorg retained a notorious union-busting law firm to represent them against their worker.

I followed the instructions to obtain a copy through the FOIA system. Personal Identifying Information has been redacted by the government.

The plaintiff charges that they were dismissed for (1)discussing and (2)protesting their pay and working conditions.

In the settlement agreement, Burning Man did not acknowledge that they had violated the National Labor Relations Act, but paid the employee in full.

The key finding is that DPW have the right to unionize, and BMorg has been forced to inform all its (200) workers of that.

So there you have it. They will “not refuse to rehire” anyone who complains about working conditions. At least, that’s what they say. YMMV.

Here’s the full documentation:

NLRB-2018-000431_Responsive_Records_Redacted_FINAL

The Pershing County Sheriff’s office have published their Post Mission Synopsis report for 2017. It’s reproduced at the end of this article, along with a couple of appendices – one which gives an idea of where incidents occurred, which some Burners may find interesting.

Pershing County Sheriff Jerry Allen. Image: News4Nevada

There was some coverage of this story at the Reno Gazette Journal “Tensions rise between Burning Man and law enforcement, again”, but it’s light on details. We’ve re-blogged a more detailed story from the Lovelock Review Miner in this post. Huge thanks to our source for sending this in.

Some Highlights

Sheriff Allen agrees with me and the USPTO that it’s a festival.

I think this is the first time I’ve seen the size of the annual drug haul, something I’m sure many Burners have been curious about:

It’s interesting to see the population changes.

This is the essence of the Sheriff’s problems with the festival:

He brings up a specific incident where Burning Man didn’t want a particular person to attend a meeting, so they went straight to the Director in Washington DC rather than raising their objections with the Sheriff’s office.

One wonders who this objectionable individual was. Dan Love? Gene Siedlitz? CIA? DEA? FBI? CDC? Humboldt General?

The Sheriff is highly suspicious of the population numbers provided by the Org.

Later in the report he mentions that the gate count may not include all the people arriving via the airline and Burner Express bus. The numbers are key because peak population above 69,999 brings them to a higher payment level, from $240,000 to $275,000.

Reading further, we have BMorg employees wielding weapons in a car chase…

And an RV full of coke and a loaded gun in early entry:

We have already covered the arrest statistics 2017 Crime Scorecard, here is the summary:

“We continue to have negative enforcement” – is this police speak for laws are broken everywhere?

We wish Sheriff Allen luck in his quest to squeeze more money from the $45 million annual event. His requests seem pretty reasonable – the cost of one junket regional festival visit for one BMorg staffer – and his office has to deal with the consequences of Burning Man all year round, not just for a week.

Re-blogged from the Lovelock Review Miner:

Sheriff submits Burning Man budget request

Wednesday, July 11, 2018 1:00 AM

Sheriff Jerry Allen submitted his law enforcement budget for next month’s Burning Man while challenging county leaders to “dispose of” the agreement that restricts the budget. Allen is concerned that public safety is at risk due to inadequate county law enforcement at the event.

The 2013 Settlement Agreement between Pershing County and festival organizer Black Rock City, LLC, limits the private group’s payments to the county for law enforcement, criminal prosecution and other services impacted by the massive festival. The agreement sets the reimbursements according to festival attendance and law enforcement command status.

Allen limited his spending as required in the 10-year agreement. His budget request is based on a less desirable but lower cost “integrated” command with the BLM and this year’s expected attendance by 70,000 to 79,999 ticket-holders. The number still doesn’t include the thousands of staff, volunteers and contractors on playa for weeks before and after the nine day event.

With the population and inflation factored in, BRC’s $275,000 base payment pencils out to a total of $299,201.92 that should be paid to the county, according to Allen. Of that, $252,462.88 will cover payroll for up to 24 law enforcement officers and jail personnel plus supplies and permanent infrastructure needed during the event including CAD (Computer-Aided Dispatch) interface, body cameras, trailers and a possible air conditioning unit for off-duty personnel.

That leaves $46,738.74 left over for the county courts and administrative services needed for the event according to Allen’s budget request. Members of the county commission are reviewing the proposal and may vote to either approve or reject it at their next meeting on July 18.

Sheriff Allen also handed out his Post Mission Synopsis on the 2017 Burning Man event. The report explains why, in his opinion, the 2013 Settlement Agreement between Pershing County and BRC shortchanges county taxpayers and event participants.

“The Burning Man Festival has, for several years, far exceeded the resources of not only Pershing County, but the Law Enforcement resources of Northern Nevada as a whole. The Pershing County Sheriff’s Office has had to ‘contract’ with several different Law Enforcement Officers within the State to provide some semblance of law enforcement expected by the participants. This endeavor is becoming increasingly difficult to perform as the population of BRC continues to increase and the payment to Pershing County remains relatively stagnant.”

In 2019, the BLM may issue a ten-year Special Recreation Permit allowing the Black Rock City population to reach 100,000 including ticket-holders, staff, volunteers and contractors. As the festival grows, Allen says a sheriff’s deputy dedicated year-round to the event will be needed.

“This Festival has increased in magnitude to the extent that Pershing County should hire a Deputy to provide for planning, logistics and execution of the plan for this Festival as well as provide for continued investigations,” he said. “The Pershing County Sheriff’s Office continues to receive calls for service long after the active portion of the Festival has concluded.”
Property and personal crime reports after the event, including minor thefts and sexual assault, must be investigated even though the evidence has vanished along with the event, Allen said.

CRIME STATS

Allen’s written report was delivered long after the deadline specified in the 2013 agreement.

“The Sheriff shall, within fourteen days after the Event, provide an After-Action Report. If the information for the AAR is not yet available at that time, then the Sheriff shall provide the information as soon as it becomes available,” states the settlement agreement.

Allen said he’s been busy with important PCSO matters, such as the vacancies for two sheriff’s deputies, but he did comply with BRC’s request for crime statistics on citations, arrests and the “actual expenses incurred in connection to the event” during the 2017 Burning Man event.

Allen’s report lists 57 arrests at the 2017 festival, an increase of 11 arrests from the 2016 event. Burners were arrested for FTA (failure to appear) warrants, sexual assault, domestic battery, possession of illegal controlled substances and trespassing.

There was a total of 125 misdemeanor citations for assault, battery, reckless driving with 121 of those citations for minor illegal drug possession “not amounting to sales or trafficking.”

Drugs seized by the PCSO at the 2017 festival included more than 639 grams of marijuana, 818 grams of psilocybin mushrooms, over 120 grams of ketamine, 13.5 grams of methamphetamine, more than 231 grams of cocaine, over 334 grams of MDMA and more than 217 doses of LSD.

POPULATION IN DOUBT

Allen says he’s skeptical of Black Rock City’s daily population reports issued electronically by Ticket Fly. The number of ticket-holders is restricted by the BLM’s Special Recreation Permit.

“I am highly suspicious of these population numbers as there is no independent verification or audit system in place to perform a quality control check,” Allen says. “From previous Festivals, it appears to the naked eye, as if BRC is well beyond the reported numbers, but at this time there is no way to verify this…There is no reason for BRC to report any number above 70,000 paid participants, due to possible consequences from both PCSO and the BLM.”

Allen said the peak population reported at one point in the 2017 event was above the permitted level of 79,000 and, as a result, Pershing County should be paid more money for the event.

“It is my recommendation that the Pershing County Board of Commissioners submit a bill to BRC for the additional $35,000 plus CPI (Consumer Price Index) for the additional monies as outlined in the 2013 Settlement Agreement,” Allen said in his synopsis.

GUN CONTROL

Firearms are not allowed inside the festival by BRC or BLM but, in 2017, a loaded rifle was discovered during set-up and four days before the gates opened, Allen said. The weapon was found in a motorhome where a large amount of cocaine was also discovered by BLM officers. The vehicle had supposedly been searched for weapons and drugs by BRC gate personnel.

“We were contacted by BLM to assist with a traffic stop,” Allen states. “While we were on scene, a rifle was also found with a round in the chamber. This vehicle was allowed into the Festival early as a part of an agreement between BRC and BLM to allow ‘early entry’ participants to assist in setting up the city’s many amenities and large art structures.”

For Allen, the incident indicates that more county law enforcement is needed before and after the event and BRC should hire professional gatekeepers to search for weapons and drugs.

“These types of incidents could also be remedied by requiring BRC to hire an independent company to provide for proper screening of persons and vehicles,” Allen states in his report.

In 2017, a brush fire south of Gerlach created a potential crisis when it forced temporary closure of Highway 447, the primary ground emergency access into and out of the Burning Man area.

“The closing of Hwy 447 shut off the main artery to get people off the playa in the event of an emergency or evacuation,” Allen says. “It also had the potential to significantly delay or stop necessary resources from reaching the playa in case of an emergency.”

Allen said a permanent mountaintop repeater is needed for communications between the PCSO in Lovelock and sheriff’s deputies on playa and, in case of a major emergency at the event, inter-agency radio communication needs improvement between PCSO, BLM, NHP and WCSO.

Funding is needed for “a minimum of 40 Deputies per shift” according to Allen. He also suggested that Pershing County and BRC “dispose of the 2013 Settlement Agreement” and work out a new agreement or adopt a cost-recovery system such as that used by the BLM.

BEHIND THE SCENES

In his synopsis, Allen revealed some of the sources of ongoing tension between the PCSO and BRC. Planning for the event requires numerous meetings throughout the year between various agencies including the PCSO, BLM, BRC, NHP and the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office. One meeting was cancelled after it started due to what BRC considered an unwelcome participant.

“Planning became very difficult however, when a scheduled meeting was cancelled at the last minute (after the meeting was to have started) by representatives of BRC due to one invitee BRC did not approve of,” Allen states. “This issue was taken by BRC to the BLM director level in Washington D.C. without first attempting to rectify this situation locally and reschedule the meeting. This action further strained the tenuous relationship between BRC and PCSO.”

Allen said local BLM and BRC officials with decision-making authority would expedite the planning process and planning meetings should take place in the county that hosts the event.

“I would offer a suggestion to have all Cooperators meetings in the Lovelock area, since Pershing County is the County in which this Festival actually takes place. This would allow for more participation from other Pershing County entities which are vital for this Festival to operate,” Allen says in his synopsis. “It would be nice to have BRC become accustomed to the area as well as the resources available within Pershing County.”

Here is Sheriff Jerry Allen’s report.

Stafford Beer is one of my heroes, someone whose thinking I followed in my own companies. I look at the role he played in creating the Cybernet, which connected the entire Chilean economy and society to a Star Trek-like bridge in the Presidential Palace. The Cybernet disappeared after Allende died in a CIA-backed coup in 1973.

Original videos used in this episode:

1. On Cybernetics – Stafford Beer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_bXl…

2. Free As In Beer: Cybernetic Science Fictions – https://vimeo.com/8000921 By Jeremiah B.C. Axelrod and Greg Borenstein from ComputerScienceFictions.com

3. The Time When A Single Computer Ran an Entire Country, Truthstream Media https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DF7ss…

4. Pegasus Computer – British Science Museum https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0YQk…

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If it was up to BMorg, Burning Man would have no music and would be 100% transformational blowjob workshops. Fortunately we have about 1000 stages, 10,000+ DJs, and RockStar Librarian to help us ignore their foolish ideals.

This year, Rockstar Librarian wants to make the world a better place with music. Support her – if you like music at Burning Man, you will appreciate her guide which comes from a team of volunteers every year. Thank you so much to Rockstar Librarian and her team, and thank you from the bottom of our hearts to all the DJs, art cars, and sound stages that have ever played at Burning Man – it’s you who makes the party.

If you’re going to support any art project this year, support the music.

Check out our collection of mixes from previous Burning Mans at our Music page.

Is Burning Man cashing in from their Smithsonian exposure, right before the big cash-out of the “Original Founders”?

Here is some of the coverage of No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick gallery:

Smithsonian web site

Smithsonian magazine

Bloomberg

Billboard

CNN

DJ Mag

Fast Company

Architectural Record

Artsy

Washington.org

The New York Times asked “Will the Spirit of Burning Man Art Survive in Museums?”

Recently, they announced a deal with Intel and Linden Labs, creators of Second Life – home of the Burn2 cyberspace regional Burn.

Sansar and Intel remake the Smithsonian’s art of Burning Man exhibit in VR (updated)

Will there be a Burning Man: IMAX 3D now?

It is great that big corporations like Intel are patrons of the arts. To whom does that patronage flow? Qui bono: who benefits? Burners?

The Smithsonisan exhibit, all the media attention around it, and now immersive HD multimedia experiences are creating a lot of value.

Where is that value going? It is going to the brand. Who owns the brand? A private company. Who are the directors of that company? Well, it does not appear to be who they told us the controllers were when we first exposed the existence of Decommodifcation, LLC.

There’s been a bit of discussion in our recent Rockstar Librarian post by trolls who think if you are going to write about Burning Man on your blog, you should be expected to pay for other peoples’ art projects from your own pocket, and you must never criticize the founders.

All of the founders made millions of dollars from the corporatization of Burning Man, and I don’t begrudge them that. I’ve never criticized them for that. They chose to sell it for the lowest possible value to the Burning Man project, which did have the effect of increasing the size of the tax breaks they all received for donating the Org to the 501(c)3 – an organization controlled by themselves, with public reporting requirements, which never pays tax. That’s just a fact. There’s no need to doxx the founders’ financial situations, this was all information publicly discussed on their web site and in the newspapers at the time.

Did they earn a lot of money previously to that transaction, that they needed a tax break to cover? We may never know, but A Balanced Perspective has provided evidence to support his analysis that the annual salaries suddenly leaped from about 2 million a year in 2009 to about 8 million a year in 2010, where it stayed for a few years before the transition was “complete”. Where did all that money go? The workers? It definitely did not go to the artists.

We exposed in Decommodification, Inc and Clarification of Decommodification that what really went on with Burning Man’s “transition to a non-profit” was not entirely altruistic. Less well publicized was the creation of a private company in 2010 called Decommodifcation, LLC that held all the actual value of Burning Man. There were various statements made by various founders around the time. Here’s what Larry said. First:

I will address two lingering perplexities. It has been asked if we intend to reveal the financial records of Black Rock City LLC. The answer is yes; that too will happen at about the same time as the Burning Man Project reveals its information—these two entities will then become a clean well-lighted suite of rooms thrown open for inspection. But I cannot guaranty that even this amount of disclosure will satisfy everyone. Even then, I suppose that some will look for skeletons in closets, or search for sliding walls that might conceal a dungeon.

[Source: burningman.org]

This did not in fact happen. Black Rock LLC’s financial records are still secret. The new organization, The Burning Man Project, is required to disclose their IRS Form 990, which is a publicly available document. They revealed what they are required to by law, and very little more. They arranged a story in Philanthropy magazine that they then pointed to as “proof” that they became more transparent. See 2014 Afterburn Report: The Death of Transparency and A Balanced Perspective’s guest post Unlikely Leader in Transparency.

The public information reveals not so much a dungeon as a giant treasure chest. Enormous amounts of cash that are being kept in the coffers. The financial reports in prior years disclosed more to the community. And the reason they were public in the first place? Because the community makes Burning Man. We The People have a right to know, because our money creates the Org to deal with the cops and the road signs and the lighting of The Man. We want to be sure our money is well spent, and not wasted on international junkets to festivals by the year round staff. The new reporting format does not deliver this, at all. There appears to be absolutely zero oversight of these matters.

As A Balanced Perspective pointed out, in an interview with Scribe in the SF Bay Guardian at the time the transition was first announced in 2011 they mentioned a second payout:

Yet Harvey and the other board members, such as Michael Mikel and Marian Goodell, insist that the board plays an important role in shepherding the event and the culture that has grown up around it, which is why they plan on waiting three years to turn control of the event over to the new nonprofit, the Burning Man Project, and another three years after that until they liquidate their ownership of the name and associated trademarks and are paid for their value.

This certainly suggests a further payout is due, one based on the value of the trademarks (very high) rather than the operating business (quite low). Control of the event was handed over to the non-profit The three years mentioned coincides with the planned dissolution of Decommodification, LLC. Which should be now. I couldn’t find any mention of it at all in the 2017 Annual Report.

Back to Larry:

So let me make one last comment regarding Decommodification LLC, which is viewed by some as a sort of sinister outbuilding that is separate from both the event organization and the Burning Man Project. My fellow founders and I are the sole members of this entity whose chief property is the name “Burning Man”. This too will be transferred to the non-profit in three years time, unless the partners elect “not” to do so by a unanimous vote. This arrangement is designed to force our hand.

The Burning Man event organization has used this trademark power to protect our community’s culture from being exploited. We have done this very diligently over several years (it is a right of ownership that must exercised, or it will perish). Furthermore, we have not relied on licensing this intellectual property as a source of revenue. The reason for this 3-year interval is that even we do not invest blind faith in the new non-profit’s workings, and we want to be perfectly sure that it can be relied upon, in the face of temptations that arise within any organization when dealing with power or money, to pursue the policies that we have practiced.

[Source: burningman.org]

Larry is saying that unless the partners vote unanimously to stop it, the intellectual property held by Decommodification LLC transfers to the Burning Man Project this year – presumably triggering a large payout. Who are the partners? The story at the time was that this was the “6 Founders” of Burning Man. Who is it today? According to Corporation Wiki, something different.

Without Larry (may he Rest in Peace), that leaves Marian and Harley as managing members, along with Crimson Rose and Director of Finance Doug Robertson who seems to have been engineering this corporate restructure since he joined in 2009. Will they vote to pass all the intellectual property back to the Burning Man Project? Or will they vote to keep it where it is, in a private company with no oversight that owns assets worth (at least) tens of millions of dollars that they completely control? We know that Decommodification LLC earns royalties from the Burning Man Project for the use of the trademarks. As best we can tell, it’s $75,000 per year. How much do museums pay? How much gets earned from documentaries, soundtracks, calendars, and other users of the brand? This information is a closely guarded secret.

We have already seen the legal resources of The Burning Man Project being employed to protect the value of the intellectual property owned by Decommodification, LLC.

Time flies. “It’s already been a few years, what’s a few more”? From the 2014 thread discussing the transition at Burning Man’s site; my opinions have not changed in the past 4 years:

A great comment along these lines from Dave:

[Source: burningman.org]

One of the things mentioned at the time of the transition was the concept of a “Dead Man’s Switch”. Danger Ranger was rather proud of having inserted this:

The sole purpose of Decommodification LLC is to protect the Burning Man name and I’ve programmed it to automatically dissolve after its mission is completed. Larry has the last word on the Transition discussion. (But I am pleased to note that I am the one who programmed the deadman switch into Decommodification LLC.)

[Source: Danger Ranger Facebook post, 2014]

Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? “Don’t worry about anything because I programmed it to automatically dissolve”. It is easy for these people to say things, but you have to use logic, not just listen to the words. Organizations that deal in the truth don’t employ Ministers of Propaganda. From the Bylaws of the Burning Man Project:

The clause above says “nobody can make any money off Burning Man”, which is the argument One Who Doesn’t Know This Dude has been making. But…there’s a but. It also says “except the Founders”.

Here’s what Larry said at the BJ:

The truth is that the Burning Man Project now employs all but one of the former owners of Black Rock City LLC.

This means we have surrendered all rights of ownership.

But that wasn’t the truth. The truth is they didn’t surrender all rights of ownership. It’s there in black and white in the bylaws.

If the “sole purpose” of Decommodification LLC was to dissolve itself once the transition to a non-profit was complete, there would be no reason for this exception clause to be in the bylaws that constitute the organization. It could be covered as part of the sale agreement, or the contract that the “three year dissolution” clause is in (if that is a different document). Instead, it appears that it was extremely important for the founders to put that in the bylaws. Their right to profit from the IP cannot be taken away, ever. I can’t find any mention in the bylaws of this Dead Man’s Switch, which is strange because the bylaws describe many other situations that require unanimous consent of the directors.

Likewise, if Decommodification LLC is designed to self-destruct as soon as the org has adjusted to being a non-profit, why did they amend the ticket terms and conditions with this?

Here’s what the Org said in their 2013 Afterburn Report

Burning Man is much bigger today than when the new Burning Man Project entity was announced in 2011 then announced as complete in 2014.

More than 4 years later, and the true value of Burning Man is still in a private company, not the non-profit. So how can the “transition to a non-profit” be complete?

IP = Intellectual Property = Intangible Assets. It is the brand of Burning Man that lets them charge $1200 a ticket to create Black Rock City. It is the brand that sells out the Smithsonian with lines around the block. And it is the brand that does a licensing deal with Intel and Second Life.

This exhibit is just the start. They can take that on the road, and with so much Burner art sitting in warehouses, they can curate multiple exhibits. When a museum hosts a Burning Man exhibit, is that gifted? If Intel makes promotional videos about virtual reality there, is that gifted? Do these corporations make a donation to the Burning Man Project? Or do they pay a royalty to Decommodification, LLC? Or both?

From the 2017 Annual Report:

Museums and Public Art

This feels like a new chapter in Burning Man’s history for multiple reasons. The fact that traditional arts and culture institutions are interested in curating Burning Man exhibitions is remarkable, but it’s important to note that these institutions came to us seeking a collaboration because they recognize Burning Man as an important arts and cultural movement (something we’ve all known for a long time). Not only are the work and stories produced by our culture seen as legitimate, they’re relevant, perhaps even necessary.

And it’s a healthy creative challenge to figure out how best to create a Burning Man experience for museum goers and participants outside of the great “tabula rasa” in the desert, while protecting and celebrating the things that make Burning Man so decidedly special and different. It has always been interesting to ask what the outside world finds meaningful about Burning Man, but given this new level of interest, there’s a new, more interesting question: What is it about this moment in history that makes Burning Man so relevant?

I hope that Larry’s vision as he originally explained it is realized, but that hasn’t happened yet. Instead it seems like the Burning Man experience is being packaged up for consumers in museums. Commodified.

If the year-round philosophy center at Fly Ranch gets built as it has been described to us for many years, awesome. If the road gets upgraded and local community concerns get addressed, awesome. If we can deal with the trash and environmental damage of 100,000 people, awesome. If everything owned by “Decommodification LLC” gets handed back from that private and secretive company to the registered non-profit, as was promised for 2018, awesome.

Until we see those things, the idea that “everything will be awesome!” is a LEGO kids movie. You have to consider the track record here. My opinions are formed carefully and backed with supporting evidence. Many of them have already proven true over the years. As for the ones above, I am hoping for “awesome”. Even after everything we have seen and discovered since my involvement began in the 90’s, I still hold out hope. Because Black Rock City is built by THE PEOPLE, not the fucking Org. It is the amazing artists who should be sharing in the spoils, not living year-round on the poverty line in dangerous fire trap warehouses, committing suicide in despair, etc. while a select few reap the rewards and the glory.

Larry Harvey said many times “Burning Man is a model for the future of civilization”. Synarchy is the wrong model.

Shadow Banning is in the news this week, with Silicon Valley tech giants Google (YouTube), Facebook, LinkedIn, and Apple all kicking Alex Jones off their platforms in a simultaneous multi-platform purge. Predictably, the Streisand Effect kicked in, sending Alex Jones’s InfoWars app trending to #3 on the download list at the App Store.

Twitter kept Jones on and CEO (and Burner?) Jack Dorsey went on Fox News’ Hannity talkshow, where he claimed they do not shadow ban accounts or target conservatives. If they don’t shadow ban accounts, then why is there this site shadowban.eu where you can type in your Twitter handle to test if you are shadow banned?

Google are good guys, aren’t they? Don’t be evil? They would never abuse their monopoly power to arbitrarily punish sites. They’re Burners, and used the Burning Man logo to promote their company to the tech industry. So they must love freedom, freedom of speech, and radical self expression, right? The goal of their search engine is to put you in touch with the best information…isn’t it?

Well maybe their vast powers of Artificial Intelligence can give me an explanation for what’s going on.

Burners.Me is by far the largest blog about Burning Man on the Internet, with almost 2000 stories written by 30 different people over 6.5 years. We have 270,000+ followers on Facebook, 15,000+ on Twitter, and tens of thousands more who subscribe to every post on email. We’ve been quoted by the New York Times, Bloomberg, The Guardian, VICE, and many other mainstream media outlets. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of other sites that link in to our articles.

We have been the #1 blog and #1 post on WordPress multiple times; and frequently in Top 100. This is not just about Burning Man, this is out of all blogs in the world. WordPress powers 27% of the Internet, 75 million blogs

So you would think that a search for “Burning Man blog” would bring this site up pretty quickly, yeah? For most of Burners.Me’s life, we were on page 1 of the search results for this. Now, it’s on the bottom of page 5, behind many smaller and abandoned blogs and some totally unrelated content.

What about a search for “Burning Man“? We have thousands and thousands of pages about every aspect of the event.

Bottom of page 11.

Hmmm. What about “burning man drugs” – we have scores of harm reduction posts by Terry Gotham. We have the actual data about drugs found at Burning Man and drug-related arrests from the Pershing County Sheriff’s office, as far as I know the only location on the Internet with that.

Funnily enough, if you search “Terry Gotham” Burners.Me is on page 1.

Use a proper search engine, duckduckgo.com, we come up 3rd for “Burning Man blog”. As it should be. Accurate search results, not Deep Mind controlled propaganda narratives.

This blog’s a hobby for me. My art project. I started it to share my opinion, not to get an audience. So the consequences of this particular search result manipulation are pretty minor. But think about what it means in context: someone from the Burning Man Project went to someone from Google – possibly direct to the Billionaire Burner founders – and said “do us a favor, mute this voice”? And they did it? No trial, no opportunity to mount a defense, no notification that anything at all had even happened. Not even the courtesy of a label like the “Fake News” people get. All you can see (if you pay attention to such things) is your web traffic go way down, for no apparent reason.

How many times a day does this happen to people that “They” don’t like, and how many messages and voices are getting invisibly tuned out of The Matrix like this? Do they do the same thing to me personally, to my friends, to my companies?

Is it right that corporations should have that kind of power? Is it right that a festival should? One that purports to be all about making the world a better place?

Perhaps there is a genuine explanation for why smaller blogs with less content rank higher. I’m all ears, Google.

What she said:

reblogged from the Lovelock Review-Miner , story by Debra Reid News4Nevada

See also our coverage of the most recent Pershing County Sheriff’s report.

Ticket prices would skyrocket, the crowd would become ultra-elite, more sherpas, more MOOP…on the plus side, the queue for the Port-a-Loo would be shorter. Maybe it becomes “2 Burning Mans” like Coachella, with everybody going to Flysalen in between to chill at the hot springs…their permit reserves the area for them for much longer than the week 9-day long event. The area reserved is also much, much larger than the pentagon shaped trash fence that encloses Black Rock City.

County requests 50,000-person limit at Burning Man

Black Rock Rangers told to “filter” crime reports to law officers

Wednesday, August 8, 2018 12:00 AM

In a letter last week to the Bureau of Land Management Winnemucca District, Pershing County District Attorney Bryce Shields recommended the BLM limit the total attendance at Burning Man to 50,000 people including ticket-holders, staff, volunteers, contractors and government officials.

The comment letter was submitted by Shields on behalf of the Pershing County Commission and the Pershing County District Attorney’s Office. The deadline for public comment on the BLM’s Burning Man Special Recreation Permit/Environmental Impact Statement was Friday.

The BLM is analyzing impacts of the event that is now allowed up to 70,000 ticket-holders plus paid and volunteer non-ticket holders who work the event. Burning Man organizers have applied for a Special Recreation Permit for the next 10 years and have requested the BLM allow them to sell more tickets meaning the total event attendance could eventually reach 100,000 people.

In his comment letter, Shields pointed out that, at its current size, the festival is already a serious drain on local resources including law enforcement, the jail, courts, roads and administrative services in Pershing County and beyond. He questioned if even the BLM could provide enough rangers to control the impacts of 100,000 participants and employees on public land resources.

“In terms of increasing the event’s size, it is doubtful that the Burning Man event can grow to 100,000 participants without increasing the number of federal and state law enforcement officers,” Shields states in the letter. “To ensure the safety of participants and law enforcement personnel, the Draft EIS should analyze the appropriate levels of staffing for federal and state law enforcement and the associated financial

burden to these agencies. As a practical matter, the analysis should include whether the Department of Interior is capable of staffing enough BLM Rangers at the event should it increase to 100,000 participants.”

Shields suggested the BLM also evaluate whether enough officers can be recruited from within the state by the Pershing County Sheriff Office to maintain public safety at the event if Burning Man continues to grow. Sheriff Jerry Allen has said that he and his staff have difficulty locating enough available law enforcement officers willing and able to help local deputies with the event.

Increased attendance means more crime and more demands on all of the county’s limited resources, Shields said. Each crime report must be investigated, evidence must be collected, suspects must be housed at the county jail and be given due process in court. An eight-day event soon turns into year-round work for law enforcement, county courts and administration.

“The volume of crimes (hundreds of misdemeanors and dozens of felonies) coupled with the impermanent infrastructure, short duration of the event, and transitory nature of most of the state law enforcement officers, renders report writing, record keeping and evidence intake a monumental task. This process strains law enforcement and prosecution resources for months after the event,” Shields states in the letter.

Shields said criminal activities at the festival may have not been reported to law enforcement officers at the request of Burning Man’s own security staff known as the Black Rock Rangers.

“Anecdotal information from state and federal law enforcement officers suggests that the BRR encourages event participants to avoid reporting incidents to law enforcement in favor of resolving matters “in house” with the BRR’s assistance,” Shields states in the letter. “Such stories from law enforcement seem to be credible because the 2018 Black Rock Ranger (BRR) Manual contains instructions to BRRs to ‘filter’ what is reported to law enforcement.”

According to Shields, the Black Rock Ranger Manual also contains a “legally inadequate definition” of “consent” for encounters such as sexual encounters.

“This woeful advice to the BRR suggests the ugly possibility that crimes at the event, including sexual assault, have been under reported to law enforcement officers in previous years,” he states in the comment letter. “In light of the possibility that crimes have gone unreported to law enforcement, the Draft EIS should evaluate what measures can be taken to ensure that crimes are accurately reported to law enforcement.”

Shields recommended the BLM investigate the screening process conducted by festival staff at the gates to the event. Gatekeepers search vehicles for people without tickets as well as illegal drugs and weapons but such contraband has been found by law enforcement inside the event.

“Is the current screening process adequate to prevent prohibited items (drugs, firearms, glitter, confetti, etc…) from entering the event?” Shields asks the BLM. “To say nothing of the copious amounts of controlled substances at the event, within the last two or three years, law enforcement officers have located firearms at the event. In one egregious case, officers discovered one AR-15 and one 9 mm handgun, along with thousands of rounds of ammunition for those weapons. In an effort to better protect participants, a more thorough screening process of vehicles and individuals should occur prior to entry.”

Shields questioned if there are adequate restrictions on minors inside the event where “adult” events occur. Rather than imposing a minimum age limit on the event, as county officials have suggested, the BLM has allowed parents to decide if their children should attend the event.

“Please include within the Draft EIS a study concerning Black Rock City’s zoning efforts in that regard,” he said in the letter. “How is the zoning enforced? How does Burning Man or the BLM ensure that minors at the event are there with the permission of their parents or guardians?”

As well as the event’s negative effects on county roads, a lesser known impact is on nearby public land users. In the letter, Shields said some of those people have had trouble accessing their private land, grazing allotments and other areas due to Burning Man roadblocks.

“Many ranchers and property owners near the Burning Man Event have expressed concerns that proposed road closures will deprive them of access to areas essential to their day-to-day business operations,” he states in the letter. “These individuals also report that, in previous years, when they have driven in close proximity to the borders of the event, they have been “hassled” by Black Rock Rangers and followed.”

Shields suggested that Burning Man or the BLM issue “visible vehicle placards” for those landowners, ranchers and other public land users who need access to areas near the event.

A lower attendance level would limit the overall impacts of Burning Man according to Shields.

“With these considerations in mind, we request that the BLM analyze the alternative of capping the event at 50,000 persons,” he wrote. “This number, of course, encompasses all attendees, including paid participants, volunteers, service providers, vendors, contractors and government personnel.”

Get pumped up with this mini-documentary by Ryan Moore with music from the Mission Impossible team.

Thanks to Mark Atwood for doing this once again. We’re not lawyers, this is not legal advice. Be careful out there.

Feel free to print out, share, and repost. This work is licensed under the CC-BY-4.0. I am not a lawyer. This document is not legal advice. If you are ticketed, cited, or arrested, consult with your attorney.

How to deal with cops at Burning Man (2018 update)

by Mark Atwood

* Do not consent to a search.

Never consent to a search. Say the phrase “I do not consent to a search.”

The cops are trained to make you flustered and to “take command” of the situation. Or they can be “polite”: “Mind if we take a look around?” Yes, you mind. “I do not consent to a search.”

Even if you have nothing for them to find, always say “I do not consent to a search.”

Never consent to a search of your body, of your clothing, of your possessions, of your car, of your truck, of your trailer, of your RV, of your tent, or of your camp. Never consent to the search of anyone else’s property.

They can ask the other people in your group or in your car, not just the driver or leader. “Mind if we take a look?” You should all sing the same song: “I do not consent to a search.”

Even if they threaten you with arrest or if threaten to bring a sniffing dog, continue to say “I do not consent to a search”. Even while they are searching you or your stuff, continue to say it. “I do not consent to a search”.

They may search you anyway. Once they start, they will trash all your stuff and dump it out on the playa. Do not give them consent once they start. They will not be more gentle with your stuff if you give them consent.

* Being Questioned.

Cops can ask you questions.

They may say things like “We’re just talking”, or “What do you think of …?”, or “Can you help us out?”

You do not have to answer their questions, and you probably shouldn’t.

They can ask you where your camp is, and who you are camping with. You don’t have to tell them, and you probably shouldn’t.

* Recreational drugs.

Never answer any questions about recreational drugs.

Remember, you never take drugs, you never carry drugs, you never supply drugs, you have no idea where to get drugs, you do not want any drugs, and you do not know anyone who does.

That includes cannabis in any form, in any amount. Cannabis is still not legal on BLM land, even for medical use. Having a medical card from any state is not a defense. The Nevada personal use possession law is not a defense.

If you have a legal prescription to a Schedule II drug such as Adderall, Ritalin, OxyContin, or Methadone, keep your pills in their correct prescription bottle and locked somewhere safe. If you need to carry any such prescription drugs with you, ask your pharmacist for a small bottle to keep just one day’s supply in, and keep that in your pocket. You can be charged if you cannot prove you have a legal prescription.

If the cops ask you details about your prescription, you do not have to answer them, and you probably shouldn’t. The only things they are lawfully allowed to ask will be printed on the prescription bottle.

* Do not lead them to your camp.

They may try to make you lead them to your camp.

They can be very commanding and matter of fact about it. They may say “We are going to your camp.” They will make it sound as if you have no choice. You do have a choice, and you are going to chose to not to lead them to your camp. Never lead them to your camp.

If they really really insist on you leading them somewhere, then lead them to a Black Rock Ranger outpost.

* Keep your tent closed.

Always keep your tent zipped closed when you are not in it. If possible, use opaque screens or sheets to block transparent window screens, so there is no line of sight into your tent. Reflective panels and reflective cloth are also good for keeping the heat of the sun out of your tent.

You may want to use a luggage lock to lock the zipper of your tent when you are not in it. If your tent is zipped shut, they are supposed to need a warrant to open it, or they are supposed to need your consent. They probably won’t have a warrant, and you are not going to give them your consent, remember? “I do not consent to a search.” They may search your tent anyway. Do not give them consent once they start. Once they start, they will probably trash your stuff, no matter what you say.

* Your name and your ID.

If they ever stop you, you do have to tell them your correct “wallet name” as it is printed on your official ID. Tell them your name as it is printed on your official ID, driver’s license, or passport. You do not have to voluntarily show them your ID if they ask to see it. You especially do not have to go to your camp to get your ID for them.

If you are a not a US citizen and are visiting on a visa waiver program, you do not have to carry your passport with you. If you are a resident alien on a visa (e.g. you have a “green card”), you do have to carry your green card with you. Sorry about that.

* Being Detained, or “Am I free to go?”.

The magic phrase is: “Am I free to go?”

Keep saying it. As soon as they say “yes”, walk away immediately and without another word. Do not run, walk.

If they write you a ticket, you must take it. Put it in your pocket, and then you say “Am I free to go?”

If they ever say you are not free to go, you say “Am I being arrested?”. If they say “no you are not being arrested”, you say again “Am I free to go?”. Keep it up as many times as necessary. Yes, it will sound like a stupid kid game, like “stop copying me”, but the game is very real with very real stakes, and this is their game to win, and yours to lose.

* Being Arrested.

If they ever say anything like “you are under arrest”, or ever do anything to make you think you are being arrested, such as them restraining you in any way, you must immediately say the following magic phrase (memorize it!): “I do not consent to any search. I hereby invoke my right to remain silent. I want to speak to my attorney.” And then you SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Do not say anything at all about your arrest until you are talking in private with your attorney. Not with those cops, not with any other cops, not with any onlookers, not with anyone else who was arrested, not with anyone who is being held with you. Not with your campmates, or with your friends, or even with your family. Even your spouse. Assume all police cars, transport vans, and cells are bugged. Assume the cops will lie about what you say to them. Assume everyone you meet while you are being held will testify against you and that will lie about what you say to them. Your best defense will be being able to say you never said anything to anyone. You invoked your right to remain silent. Use it.

* Alcohol.

The camps with open bars that are giving away booze may ask to see your ID to verify you are older than 21. You don’t have to show it to them, but they don’t have to give you free booze either.

The state liquor cops will be there trying to sting your camp. If you are giving away booze, even if it’s only beer or wine, and the person you are about to give it to looks like they could possibly be under 21, you should verify their age by checking their ID.

Even if your camp is not running a public bar, random people will walk into your camp and ask for booze. You will almost certainly have an under-21 plainclothes liquor cop walk into your camp at least once during the week, to try to sting you.

An alcohol service bust is an expensive way to ruin your burn for your entire camp.

* Who Watches the Watchmen?

While the cops are dealing with you, you need to be memorizing the color and design of their uniforms and memorizing their name tags. They are supposed to be wearing visible name tags while in uniform. Yeah, right.

As soon as you get away from the cops, promptly go to Center Camp or to a Black Rock Ranger outpost to fill out a Law Enforcement Feedback Form and immediately turn it in.

If you personally with your own eyes see the cops detaining anyone, arresting anyone, or searching anyone or anything, do the same thing: memorize what you can and then fill out and turn in a Law Enforcement Feedback Form as soon as you can.

Each morning, all the feedback forms are read out loud in a meeting with the with the police leadership and the event leadership.

If the cops dump your stuff from your car, trailer, tent, or pockets out onto the playa ground, make sure you describe that in the feedback form. The Bureau of Land Management leadership have opinions about the cops trashing the playa.

* Your camera.

When you see the cops, you may choose to use your camera to record them. The Judiciary at all levels has clearly stated that everyone, including you, has the right to record the police. Cops hate it, but too bad.

If a cop tell you to turn off your camera, keep recording. If they threaten to arrest you for recording, keep recording.

They cannot lawfully order you to stop recording. They cannot lawfully order you or anyone else to delete photos or video. They cannot lawfully delete any photos or video themselves. If they do, they themselves are knowingly breaking the law and that will be very useful in court.

If you ever see a cop order anyone to stop recording or to delete anything, make sure that goes on the Law Enforcement Feedback Form.

While you are recording them, never get in their way, and stay back at least 35 feet / 10 meters.

* “Undercover” cops.

The cops claim there are very few “undercover” cops at the event. This is a very carefully nuanced untruth.

There are cops at the event who are not “undercover” but instead are “plain clothes”. This means that instead of wearing uniforms or visible badges they are dressed up to look like burners.

They do not have to tell you they are cops when you ask them. You will not be able to “sense” that they are cops. Some of them have been doing this every year for more years than you have come to the event yourself.

People have been busted by a cop who was wearing only sparkles and a miniskirt. Cops have been seen standing nearly naked on top of speakers next to mainstages, pointing out the use of cannibus to uniformed cops circling the dance floor.

If someone you do not know asks for drugs or offers to trade you anything for drugs, they are a cop. If you met them this year at this Burn, you do not know them. If someone sits down on a couch next to you, or in an art car next to you, and gets around to asking about drugs, they are a cop.

If you met these two girls a few days ago looking at art out in deep playa, and they are really cute, and they went out dancing with you last night, and they just suggested that if you can supply some “favors”, you all can “party together” in your tent, they are cops. No, really, yes, she and her girlfriend both are cops, and her coworkers are eagerly standing by to ruin your whole year.

* What if I need “Police Services”?

What if you are lost? Or a camp mate is lost? Or your child is lost? Or you have found a lost child? Or you have found someone who is injured or who is unable to take care of themselves? What if you are assaulted? What if something has been stolen? What if someone is hurt? What if you find someone who is dangerously out of sorts? What if you just can’t even?

Go to a BLACK ROCK RANGER or to an ESD VOLUNTEER. The Rangers or ESD will help deal with the situation. If the cops are actually needed, the Rangers or ESD can summon the cops and can deal with the cops. If the cops are not needed, then the Rangers or ESD can summon the right help for you.

Know what the Black Rock Ranger uniform is, and how it’s different from the cop uniforms. Rangers wear khaki shirts and khaki hats with the Burning Man logo on their hats, and on their chests, and on their backs, and on their vehicles. ESD have yellow shirts that say “Emergency Services” on them.

Black Rock Rangers are not cops. They really are there to help you, no kidding.

Have a great Burn!

Are rangers really Brand Protectors? That is what is being alleged in discussions in the local community. Who should decide what is sexual assault, and what gets brushed off as “unwanted touching”? Cops? Black Rock Rangers? Ummm, here’s a thought: the victim?

BMorg wants to increase the population size to 100,000, which would bring them at least another $15 million per year. The larger population size is effectively a tax on the food and drink camps, not to mention a MOOP and abandoned bike nightmare. It is a boon for the airline and bus service, and will require even more vendors licensed to sell stuff on the Playa. The tiny Pershing County, where a quarter of the population are incarcerated, is already overloaded with the year-round burden of Burning Man. They think that a 50,000 population is more realistic.

Some of our previous coverage:

Pershing County Asks to Limit Black Rock City to 50,000

Sheriff asks Org to pony up more money and officers

Local sheriff overwhelmed by Burning Man arrests

BURNILEAKS: Sexual Assaults, Missing Kids and Violent Crime

Recent story from Reno Gazette-Journal Are Nevada’s Small Towns Ready For Burning Man To Hit 100,000 people?

Black Rock City’s Law Enforcement Liaison Roger Vind presented to Pershing County Commissioners yesterday. We are publishing his statements as well as our source’s notes on them. You can download the 2017 PCSO Post-Mission Synopsis here.

From DS:

I have attached a copy of the comments made by Roger Vind BRC’s Law Enforcement Liaison and presented to the Pershing County Commissioners yesterday.

DS:

Below are my comments submitted to the LRM reporter. I expect an article in our local paper next week. I will forward a copy when available.

Please note the authorization for traffic stops on the Playa comes from BRC with the signed SRP. The 2013 Settlement Agreement specifies Integrated Command.

Prior to 2014 the BLM LEO agency(s) used the Federal Court and most of the drug citations were dismissed with a $500 traffic fee or so I believe. With the significant reduction  of fees paid to Pershing County due to the 2013 Settlement Agreement’s INTEGRATED COMMAND as insisted by BRC. Which has shifted to Pershing County the prosecution of crimes on the Playa. A consequence of Integrated Command.

I always marvel at BRC’s chutzpa  in trying to alter reality.

Here are my comments after reading the text of the statement for the record by R. Vind. I have sent by previous e-mail a copy of the BRR Manual and inserted some excerpts below.

I see the Rangers as BRAND PROTECTORs not Law Enforcement assets for either Black Rock City (BRC), the BLM or Sheriff though BRC tends to use them as though they are a Law Enforcement offset. Having read the Sheriff’s 2017 Post Mission Synopsis (PMS), the published text of the District Attorney’s EIS/SRP comments, I can find no validation of BRC’s complaints or their alternate reality unsupported by actual facts. I have included Unified Crime Report (UCR) graphs below.

Roger Vind (NHP Lt. ret.) BRC Law Enforcement Liaison

Emma Weisman Agency Relations Manager at Burning Man

In evaluations of the new SRP proposal. BLM is seeking input from interested publics and local and state agencies about the potential impacts (both positive and negative) on the resources of the Black Rock Desert environment, the social services necessary to support such a large event and economic impacts associated with the event.         Comments will be considered as part of the scoping process until August 4, 2018.

 My Itemized response to Burning Man’s concerns:

• Pershing County has never produced the (Burning Man) Event
• The BLM Burning Man EIS SRP public comment period was open to both the Public and Cooperators and not subject to the whims or revisions of the Multi-Million Dollar San Francisco based for profit corporation (BRC). BRC has done two Public Comment meetings in Pershing County and meets frequently with the BLM.
• The statement “In fact there are 57 instances pertaining to Law Enforcement in the 2018 Black Rock Ranger Manual…” is unclear, confused, and needs clarification.
• Additionally the following statement “the manual clearly supports law enforcement’s roles and our utilization of law enforcement involvement.” Is telling. (The manual is available online)
• Unreported Sexual Assaults are a serious matter that BRC should finally address for the benefit of their participants/victims as our District Attorney suggests: “Anecdotal information from state and federal law enforcement officers suggests that the BRR encourages event participants to avoid reporting incidents to law enforcement in favor of resolving matters “in house” with the BRR’s assistance,” Shields states in the letter. “Such stories from law enforcement seem to be credible because the 2018 Black Rock Ranger (BRR) Manual contains instructions to BRRs to ‘filter’ what is reported to law enforcement.” (The “filtering” is done in part by the BRR chain of command as indicated by the manual.) And is clearly not contradicted by Sheriff Allen as R. Vind alleges.
• R. Vind goes on to complain about the self inflicted wound from the Settlement Agreement’s Integrated Command BRC’s cost savings bonanza.
• Then ignorantly refers to “The County also generates revenue from the convictions it secures…”
• BRC authorizes the BLM to perform “traffic stops” in the closure area, has done so for years with their SRP.
• BRC’s 2017 Afterburn report might be done December of 2018. It takes over a year before its available. BRC pays ONLY for an eight day event which means the Sheriff’s PMS is done at TAXPAYER expense.
• Are the Commissioners still waiting to receive Emergency Plans previously requested?
• Has there been ANY community involvement in Pershing County from BRC as requested by Commissioner Rackley last year?
• This is the first year BLM/BRC has acknowledged the legal requirement for Vendor compliance with County Business Licenses.
• Firearm(s) found in the vehicle of a BRC employee during the 2016 Coroner’s investigation. The others had been admitted to Black Rock City after the Contraband search by BRC in 2017.

The voters of Pershing County will hold the Sheriff accountable for the magnificent job he is doing despite the budget limitations imposed by BRC and their untrustworthy conduct, unreasonable, and outlandish demands.

BRC has a clear financial incentive to increase the “paid population” by 30,000 at the standard ticket price of $425 or $12.75 million.

Pershing County has acknowledged the actuality that 50,000 is a more viable population cap for our limited resources.

(excerpts) 2018 Black Rock Ranger Manual

Sexual harassment, as defined within the Ranger Department, may consist of, but is not limited to, any unwelcome touching, stalking, repeated requests for a date after someone has said “no,” continuing to engage in sexual discussion or banter after being asked to stop, or similar behavior. Harassment will not be tolerated, regardless of who engages in it.

What happens if I make a report?

Reports of harassment are very serious. The Ranger Personnel Manager will investigate reports of harassment and will take remedial measures when appropriate. If you have made a report and are one of the principal people involved, you will be notified of the findings when the investigation is complete.

Will my report be kept confidential?

Information about harassment reports will be kept confidential and only shared with Ranger Managers on a need-to-know basis to complete the investigation. The Rangers’ policy with regard to sexual harassment or violence in the workplace is one of zero tolerance. We strongly support and adhere to the Burning Man policy. Burning Man is founded on expectations set by the community standards inherent to it.

One such community standard is creating an environment that is free of sexual harassment and violence by volunteers, staff, or vendors. Any reported occurrences will be investigated and regarded with the utmost compassion and gravity. The investigation will follow the guidelines set by the Burning Man Board for conflict resolution. Violation of this policy may result in progressive discipline, up to and including: counseling, eviction, termination, or legal action. The full text of the Burning Man Project’s organization-wide conflict resolution protocol may be found here.

In approaching any situation, a Ranger’s initial default action is DO NOTHING. (The exceptions to this axiom are must-report situations [e.g., medical emergencies, lost child, etc.]). If, in the process of doing nothing, you decide that your presence would be helpful, engage by helping participants solve their own problems. If they are unable to do so, try to solve the problem for them. If the situation still needs attention, call Khaki.

Must-Reports—Situations that Must Be Called in Immediately Black Rock Rangers are entrusted with considerable flexibility in how they handle the situations they encounter in Black Rock City. Rangers are trained to rely on their own judgment and abilities, and to escalate matters (generally to Khaki who is part of the Shift Command Team) for assistance when appropriate. There are, however, situations in which the Ranger Department requires that Rangers report what they observe to the Shift Command Team immediately.

The requirement to report is in place to ensure that the Burning Man organization is aware of events that are critical to maintaining agreements we have in place with other departments and agencies, our internal reporting metrics, or legally required or advisable record keeping and reporting.

It is important to note that this policy only requires that a Ranger escalate required information to the Shift Command Team. The Shift Leads will then follow up with appropriate actions, which may be as simple as noting the event in the shift log, or may include further escalation. It is not the individual Dirt Ranger’s responsibility to contact LE or medical.

How to Report

All reports begin by calling Khaki on the radio.

Crime and Population Statistics