I wrote this nearly 10 years ago. Most of that crew carried on partying (eventually became part of K32) but the vandalism didn’t stop.
By 2005 Thames Valley Police pretty much had a zero tolerance policy on Reading, and the damage to the buildings was one reason why the feds increasingly felt justified in storming in and doing stuff like pushing tables loaded with equipment and speakers over if they can get away with it and have enough units to do so (they never used to be as heavy as that).
unfortunately the situation was a lot more complex and bleaker.
Its simply not feasible to have vigilanté squads dishing out punishment beatings to suspected vandals (with the risk of misidentification) in a building they have no legal title to when even rentaguards and legit building owners would get sent down for seriously physically attacking a vandal themselves.
Especially when cops were already shutting down the party and present… realistically the only thing they could have done is removed the people with reasonable force and handed them over to the cops, but that would of course get the rave crew a rep of being “grasses” and lead to reprisals.
That said, TVP have in fact stepped in at various raves to stop various kinds of “vigilanté justice” being doled out, usually by arresting people from both sides… or have defused the aftermath of fights (having turned up along with ambulances)
What was worse is in many cases it wasn’t “random chavs” doing the vandalism.
It was people who otherwise claimed to be ravers, who knew the crews and were otherwise on friendly terms with them, and were surreptitiously doing damage in small groups avoiding those who might see them and challenge them (as they knew who to avoid!) Many of these kids weren’t bored chavs either but middle class “ravers” who had a lot of hidden anger and tension.
It was only several years later (after these idiots had thankfully stopped partying) I managed to work out some of what had been going on. IMO it was even worse than stuff like feds trying to infiltrate activist groups, at least the feds have a reason to “betray” people…
