Tensions rise between Burning Man and law enforcement, again

Jenny Kane | Reno Gazette Journal

Show Caption Hide Caption Watch: Burning Man's anything-goes (and temporary) city The annual Burning Man event centers on building an almost-anything-goes city in the desert for just a week.

With Burning Man just around the corner, event organizers are again at odds with law enforcement over staffing and practices.

A recent report from the Bureau of Land Management, which provides the majority of law enforcement at the 80,000-person event, insisted that the Burning Man organization pay for more officers.

But Burning Man organizers say there are already too many overzealous cops on the playa -- a gripe the organization has had for the past three years.

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"Event organizers still disagree with how law enforcement is spending its time and whether it is the best use of resources," said Burning Man spokesman Jim Graham in response to the report.

Cops by the numbers

The Burning Man organization last year paid approximately $4.5 million to the BLM for its costs, contracted work and applicable fees. About $1.2 million went toward law enforcement resources, Graham said.

The BLM works with the Pershing County Sheriff's Office on the playa. The BLM had 53 officers and six investigators on site. Pershing County had 19 officers and three investigators.

That's one officer per nearly 1,000 people. But even that is too much for Burning Man.

"The massive scale of the law enforcement operations on playa is already unreasonable," Graham said.

The BLM has not made any arrests at Burning Man for several years, though it issued more than 400 citations last year.

Local authorities last year arrested 58 people on a variety of charges, including drug possession, domestic battery and sexual assault. They cited several hundred others.

BLM officials are requesting more staff from the local sheriff's office, which is trained in person-on-person crimes, including assaults and thefts. Federal officers focus on federal violations, such as drug use and fuel spills.

Because BLM officers are not trained to investigate person-on-person crimes, they often had to wait up to a half hour for local officers to arrive, Pershing County Sheriff Jerry Allen said.

More: Burning Man wants permission to grow to 100,000 people in the coming years

Money, money, money

The only way that the sheriff's office will be able to make more deputies available is with more money from Burning Man, Allen said. The sheriff's office currently receives $185,000 each year from Burning Man to cover the cost of chasing crime at the event.

"We don’t have the money to change anything. We don’t have the opportunity," Allen said. "It's supposed to cover all that (we do), but it doesn’t. We always go several thousand dollars over every year."

Between meals, IT networks, trailers, fuel, offices, a medical tent for law enforcement and K9 units, and a number of other services, Burning Man organizers estimated that they already pay for more than $250,000 in additional resources used by the sheriff's office and BLM officials each year.

"What seems to have prompted the request for more funds was an enforcement policy change by the current sheriff to do more targeted or proactive law enforcement," Graham said.

Law enforcement officers spend countless hours on "optional activities" at the event, like stopping vehicles for broken taillights or other minor infractions, Graham said. Additionally, law enforcement units spent as much as two-thirds of their time in an “available” status, according to Burning Man organizers' review of last year's dispatch calls.

"BLM and Pershing County law enforcement officers spent a significant majority of their responses on the playa engaged in public contacts like giving directions to the bathrooms and on traffic stops... in an event with a 5 mph speed limit and next to no vehicle accidents," said Graham.

The sheriff responded that the officers are just doing their jobs.

"We do get a lot of public service calls, but we are public servants so we answer any call that we're called to," said Allen, adding that just because staff are "available" does not mean they're not busy eating lunch or writing reports.

More: Man who died after running into Burning Man fire was from Oklahoma, living in Switzerland

Same issue, different year

The issues brought to light this year are largely the same ones that BLM officials and Burning Man organizers were squabbling over in recent years.

The BLM has repeatedly said law enforcement staffing at Burning Man is appropriate, and Burning Man organizers have repeatedly questioned the same.

The cost for Burning Man to coordinate the event with the BLM has steadily risen over the past decade, but so too has the population of the event and the extravagance.

Burning Man organizers and BLM officials are currently in the process of analyzing whether the event could grow to 100,000 people in the coming years. The event first started in 1986 with only a few dozen people. It later evolved into a desert campout of several hundred, and today it is requires the BLM's most expansive special recreation permit in the nation.

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