HEADING HOME
The party is over as festival goers head home from last weekend’s Craven Country Jamboree.
CRAVEN — A total of 124 in custody, 144 liquor tickets, one arson charge and an indeterminate amount of muck — that’s the Craven Country Jamboree by the numbers for the RCMP.
As the Mounties tally up the final figures for the music festival, Lumsden RCMP Sgt. Craig Cleary said the weekend’s rain and, in turn, the mud not only left some of the wannabe rowdies in a rut, but also took a toll on policing.
“The mud certainly brings upon us many challenges,” Cleary said Monday, explaining how it affected everything from patrolling the campgrounds to the logistics of moving close to 20,000 people on and off the site.
Cleary said not all of the 34 additional officers brought in to assist at the Craven site had access to vehicles able to negotiate sodden roads. That meant fewer patrols in the campground — but not necessarily less enforcement.
“We use common sense. … If there’s situations where we had difficulty getting into a site, some of the staff here helped us get out to sites to check it out and try to diffuse situations,” he said.
Some of the bigger challenges were around traffic flow — at least, for those that could move. Many vehicles and campers were still in the queue for a tow Monday and Cleary expected some problems well into the week.
“( Monday) there are challenges getting people out (and) yesterday, so traffic’s backed up quite a bit,” Cleary said.
Officers were at the exits to help with traffic control. On Wednesday, some of those same officers were steering people away from the site after torrential rains temporarily forced organizers to close the gates.
Overall, he said the officers took the conditions in stride.
“A few of us are pretty muddy — muddy from head to toe. But that’s just one of the things that does happen,” he said. “We’re not here to look pretty. We’re here to do a job.”
And so they did, taking 124 people into custody between Wednesday and Monday morning. The number was slightly down from last year’s 127, when flooding forced the campground to higher ground, but considerably lower than the 160 arrests two years ago. Cleary blamed it on the rain.
“It actually dampens things quite a bit. … You have your diehards that won’t let the weather obviously affect things, but at the same time, there’s a definite reduction in people mulling out and about,” he said.
Police still made ample use of two portable jail cells brought in to add to the existing two cells at the Lumsden detachment.
“It worked out well, because we actually had one individual stick his underwear down the toilet and he flooded it, so we had one less cell available to us (Sunday).”
One person believed to have set fire to a camper was among those who got to try out the cells.
As the jamboree wound down Sunday, security officials had a couple of overturned camper-trailers whose windows were smashed removed from the campground out of fear they would be set aflame.
Of the 325 “occurrences” that got police attention, a reported sexual assault was later deemed false when the complainant admitted it wasn’t true.
On-site during the festival, seven people were charged with impaired driving, two for assault, three for drugs and 18 for other offences, including mischief and resisting arrest. Off-site, traffic services charged 10 people with impaired driving, 15 for driving while suspended and three for drug offences.