Electric Forest (2011) police post-mortem: not bad for its size (a recap from last year)

For those of you about to leave next week for Electric Forest, here is the first in a series of information from last year's festival which I think is worth reading. This one is about the law enforcement activity surrounding last year's festival. Check it out...

(July 2011, John S. Hausman)
A young woman with a drug overdose flown to a Grand Rapids hospital.

A vehicle theft, a few dozen drug arrests or warrants, a few assault and resisting police complaints.

But no deaths, no major violence, no mass levitation.

All in all, not a bad law-enforcement record for a hippie-oriented music festival that drew more than 13,000 people to a patch of Oceana County's rural Grant Township.

That was the police post-mortem on the Electric Forest festival, which ran Thursday through Monday on the grounds of the Double JJ Ranch near Rothbury.

“Overall, it was a good festival,” said Lt. Kevin Leavitt of the Michigan State Police Hart post. “Things ran smoothly.”

The state police provided on-scene law-enforcement presence, with between 12 and 18 troopers patrolling the festival grounds at any given time, Leavitt said. As with the bigger ROTHBURY festival in 2008 and 2009, the state police provided on-site security under contract with the promoters at no extra cost to taxpayers. The festival also hired private “event staff” security.

The bigger law-enforcement stories happened off site and involved non-Michiganders:

• A naked Tennessee man was found Tuesday on Holton Whitehall Road near U.S. 31 outside Whitehall after walking from a nearby motel. The 23-year-old, who had attended Electric Forest, was transported by ambulance to a Muskegon hospital for detoxification.

• Allegan County Sheriff's deputies last week seized 11 pounds of “hash candy bars” from a vehicle en route to Rothbury and arrested the Denver pair in the van. The department later made other drug seizures and arrests from other vehicles headed to the festival.

• Late Tuesday, a 42-year-old Louisville, Ky., man was arrested at the Fremont Wal-mart after allegedly assaulting a 25-year-old acquaintance and stealing his van while both were working cleanup at Double JJ, according to Lt. Craig Mast of the Oceana County Sheriff's Department.

As for the four-day festival itself, Leavitt said the state police took 47 complaints.

Of those, eight suspects were lodged at the Oceana County Jail for more serious felonies allegedly committed at the festival, mostly drug-related, and another two on fugitive warrants.

Police are also seeking arrest warrants against 31 people in less serious cases, Leavitt said — most for narcotics violations; in one case for ticket scalping.

“We try to take into consideration that it's the Fourth of July weekend, so if we can go 'complaint and warrant with the prosecutor' for local people (as opposed to immediate jailing), we try to do that so it doesn't overload the jail for the weekend,” Leavitt said.

Charges against the eight people jailed over the weekend included possession with intent to deliver Ecstasy, cocaine and marijuana; assaulting police; and, in one suspect's case, resisting and obstructing police, trespass and malicious destruction to a police patrol car.

No serious injuries were reported as a result of violence, and no one was reported to have died of any cause, in contrast to the 2009 ROTHBURY festival. The young woman flown to Grand Rapids for overdose treatment was reported doing well by Wednesday, Leavitt said.

“We didn't run into a lot of violence at the festival,” he said. “It's usually pretty low-keyed, and everyone's happy to be there. But in every large gathering you have your few cases.”

Overall, police were pleased with how things went.

“We worked real closely with their security, the (emergency medical technicians) and fire (departments), so that all the public safety agencies worked real well together,” Leavitt said. “This is our third festival, so we've worked most of the bugs out.”
(Michigan Live, http://www.mlive.com/news/muskegon/index.ssf/2011/07/electric_forest_police_post-mo.html)