Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics
ihavenapkinthoughts.substack.com
ihavenapkinthoughts.substack.com
Burning Man has slowly re-created the regulatory state in response to the standard pressures of civilization. To their credit, this has often been in response to near-misses, but sometimes in response to fatalities. It started with sanitation (potties), and banning guns/explosives. You can have 100 people shooting guns at a party in the desert without sanitation and muddle through. At 10k, you are building a cholera-mad-max experiment. A car running over a sleeping person prompted a designated road network. And then they adopted zoning, with hush-ville and the large sound installation ends. All supported by the ranger team preventing injury every day. Civilization is work.
Burning Man still enables and allows dangerous art that you can fuck up your shit on. The organization has an interesting take on this: they allow dangerous art, so long as it looks as dangerous as it is. They don't want participants to be surprised that something was dangerous, because they want you to be able to do your own reasonable risk assessment.
(Though, I think the really impressive installations are the ones that look/feel more dangerous than they actually are.)
For what it's worth, I think this is a great exercise that should be undertaken now and again: you may not realize the ways in which a system is good or bad until you endeavor to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch.
In the case of Burning Man, there's structure that let's people be mostly safe by default, while supporting some reasonable risk taking. In the case of crypto, I think we've seen use cases where there's value in having a means of storing and transferring wealth outside of government control, which we saw the benefits of early on as governments tried to financially wall off groups like Wikileaks.
Does that mean we want all of the safe guards gone? No. Does that necessarily mean society and its structures are perfect and should never change? I think obviously, also no.
Can you give some examples?
This is actually what I was thinking of when I made this comment. I witnessed someone in some position of authority (from either DPW/Artery/someone else clearly sent to check it out) on the first day talking to one of the artists. They were literally watching people climb it and were like "yep, that looks pretty dangerous" and then went on their way.
It felt safe-ish to climb at first, until about halfway up when you could feel it swaying back and forth in the wind. I am usually the "climb dumb shit at Burning Man" type, but had my stomach drop about 3/4 of the way up and had to abort. It was very easy to grip, nothing felt insecure, etc, so it was definitely "safe" if you knew what you were doing. But if you ate it off the top of that, you'd be fucked.
Those quotation marks doing a lot work...I guess those IBCs are 1m tall? so 8m at the top. A fall from 8m could result in severe injury if not fatality. Fucked indeed...
https://pdf.journalagent.com/travma/pdfs/UTD_19_6_529_535.pd...
Like free solo rock climbing: it's actually fairly safe if you do it on a route you know inside out, that is well within your ability, and in good condition. But if it's not in good condition and holds might come loose, nobody in their right mind - and the knowledge to recognize the condition - would free solo it.
Of course if you don't do something you're never going to be at risk from whichever activity it was.
Some activities always have risk, for example ski-touring (backcountry if you're a Yank). If there's skiable snow, avalanche danger is never zero.
So not risk free.
Exactly. If nothing is risk free then the original statement we’re discussing is untrue.
Yeah, if you fall you might hurt yourself, but when you're paying attention to what you're doing you're likely less at risk than when you absent-minded walk down some stairs.
We spent probably hundreds of hours climbing all manner of tall playground structures as children, and I cannot recall anyone ever falling. I do remember some instances of people tripping and falling down a flight of stairs though...
There are things you do 100,000 times in your lifetime, with a 99.999% success rate, where failure may kill you. You can't really avoid those.
Also, fun fact: they are literally held together with large metal zip ties.
[0] - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/585886.This_Is_Burnin...
My friends who went in the late 90s recounted shooting at propane tanks from moving vehicles and having to camp inside of a ring of parked cars to protect your camp (from vehicular traffic)
After 2000 you had to show some decent design (not just a golf cart with dingleberries) and that was about it, they passed our moon car and shark van without much question, and the shark van was a giant sharp thing without lights.
Others will have to fill in the regs now, I understand things have gotten progressively more rigorous.
My understanding is that anything built on the playa, including the art (eg. temple of gravity) has an engineer's stamp just like would in Reno. Or just a bit more dusty.
https://logicmag.io/justice/fred-turner-dont-be-evil/
Between 1966 and 1973, we had the largest wave of commune building in American history. These people were involved in turning away from politics, away from bureaucracy, and toward a world in which they could change their consciousness. They believed small-scale technologies would help them do that. They wanted to change the world by creating new tools for consciousness transformation.
This is the tradition that drives claims by companies like Google and Facebook that they are making the world a better place by connecting people. It’s a kind of connectionist politics. Like the New Communalists, they are imagining a world that’s completely leveled, in which hierarchy has been dissolved. They’re imagining a world that’s fundamentally without politics.
It’s worth pointing out that this tradition, at least in the communes, has a terrible legacy. The communes were, ironically, extraordinarily conservative.
When you take away bureaucracy and hierarchy and politics, you take away the ability to negotiate the distribution of resources on explicit terms. And you replace it with charisma, with cool, with shared but unspoken perceptions of power. You replace it with the cultural forces that guide our behavior in the absence of rules.
So suddenly you get these charismatic men running communes—and women in the back having babies and putting bleach in the water to keep people from getting sick. Many of the communes of the 1960s were among the most racially segregated, heteronormative, and authoritarian spaces I’ve ever looked at.
> At other companies, I think it’s very sincere. I’ve spent a lot of time at Facebook lately, and I think they sincerely want to build what Mark Zuckerberg calls a more connected world
That's a big presumption.
1.) You cant take a single factor out of multi factoral decision and claim it is "revealed preference". It might be "cost they have to pay for something else".
2.) You cant assume they had ability to predict the future when they joined the community.
3.) You cant assume they have a place to go to now.
4.) You cant ignore women who in fact left those communities.
5.) You cant ignore majority of the women who in face did not joined the community.
And the same thing applies to men btw. You cant just claim that a suboptimal situation in which a man stayed is somehow revealed preference of males.
I'd love to read a history of it, but it won't be me. I haven't been in years, and it has changed profoundly since my first visit in 2000.
To begin with, camp fires were a normal -- even essential -- part of BM. Walking around, the city was illuminated by the flickering glow of crackling fires and conversation. And many of the temporary structures would be disposed of by having a big bonfire, often burn-night, or Sunday after, as a part of exodus.
But this caused several problems that demanded solutions. Camp fires can kick off sparks, and sparks in a large dense tent city is bad juju. So they forbid open fires, and required contained burn barrels or stoves. Big fires built directly on the playa get hot enough to bake the clay and leave burn scars. This violated their permits from the BLM. So they required metal insulation below. After a few of revs in the rules, fire in camps became practically forbidden.
It was sad. Campfires were replaced by lighting, and sound systems. Small group bonfire rituals were forbidden. So the warm, inviting glow of a crackling campfire and the murmur of conversation were replaced by the repellent cold light of leds, and edm, like an empty club. Serendipity and connection suffered.
Some of this seems subjective.
Also drive on beaches would be a good example.
In Finland there are specific signposted pedestrian zones, where cars may enter but must not exceed 20kmh and must give priority to pedestrians (as must cyclists). They are typically the areas surrounding apartment building entranceways.
If by them you mean roads, then yea, that's the point.
You can do a lot without designated and built roads, as buring man up to that point obviously demonstrated. If it wasn't constantly growing, they probably could have gone several years without another death
Offroading, unless it's on sand dunes, generally has paths (i.e., roads), either official or well-trodden ones, that people drive on. Are people sleeping on these paths or in the middle of the sand dunes?
I thought Burning Man was full of "smart" people?
There are no stop signs at intersections at Burning Man and thousands of cyclists and yet there are very few collisions. Why? Everyone has to pay attention.
Eventually though, drugs, drinking, driving and tents randomly placed around the open lake bed lead to disaster and they had to add roads. This helped in other ways too. It meant that emergency services could find people who needed help. I also meant that it was easier to describe where your tent was to your friends, or find your way back to camp.
All over Europe you see "horizontal speed bumps": deliberate road constrictions that funnel you into oncoming traffic. To an American it looks crazy but it works.
You'd be surprised how *really* *fucking* *stupid* "smart people" are.
Even you. Even me.
Fuck off with that. It's actually important, and the HSE website has a lot of case studies explaining why.
For example you are absolutely not under any circumstances allowed to bring matches or cigarette lighters onto oil or gas related sites. You'd think that would be pretty reasonable, right? There's even a a smoking shelter with special lighters attached to the wall so people can smoke, well away from the explodey stuff. But no, "OMG 'elf an' safety gone mad innit?"
Does anyone want to know *why* matches and lighters are banned? Anyone care to take a guess as to whether or not there was a specific incident leading up to the ban?
Okay then, here it is: https://www.hse.gov.uk/comah/sragtech/casebpdalment87.htm
Read the fourth paragraph a couple of times until it sinks in properly.
A colleague of mine sometimes has described some people as "A case study waiting to happen".
Also, everyone makes mistakes. But some people are, quite literally, a danger to themselves and others, and everyone needs to be protected from them. Including themselves.
I have been to campings for decades and all of them have road/streets for cars despite having less people and less money than burning man.
I don't like the people standing on the sidelines saying "Those were obviously useful fences." Ya but most fences suck. If you don't have healthy mechanisms for shedding/fresh slates your system will rot.
It’s proof of the opposite of your conjecture.
Anarchy always rapidly evolves in to government.
Whoever, or whichever group, performs the making, administering, and enforcement of rules, is the government.
but regardless, if you want to call the state in anarchism where people collectively form together to create rules and order "government", be my guest
You’re wrong.
When you go out in to the world you’re learn that for yourself.
Amy group of humans who think they can run things ”collectively” is always immediately over run by those who know they can’t.
What are you talking about? You can most certainly get kicked off BM, you can get criminally charged, etc.
Which has also been done elsewhere, so doesn't explain the difference?
It starts with being ready to help people who are having health crises. Then when a serious crime happens the community wants it to be investigated, and they call the only organised group that can help.
Most people at high risk of random death are filtered out before they arrive.
There are so many better comparisons that could have been chosen. Comparing Burning Man to outdoor music festivals would be so much more accurate.
It probably wouldn’t be very interesting though, since those are too similar. One or two deaths over a three-day festival with some tens of thousands of people attending is completely normal even in highly regulated environments like the German mega-festivals.
I don't have time to research this fully, but the first few papers that popped up showed that a lot of the casualty events from music festivals are due to incidents like mass stampedes or even motor vehicles, which I suspect would be much lower at Burning Man. On the other hand, deaths from drug overdose or "structural collapse" are probably higher at Burning Man.
Comparing like-for-like, or as close as you can get, is what enables these interesting comparisons. Pointing out that you're less likely to die of cancer or car crashes while attending burning is not helpful when you compare against population level statistics.
Burning Man has a hugely skewed age demographic, one that has a significant share of deaths due to car+other accidents, suicide, overdose, homicide, and cancer. Like nearly 7/10 chance of dying from once of those.
Beside cancer those are all strongly linked to poverty, and cancer death in younger adulthood may be linked to poverty.
The place certainly has extremes but it’s also a destination where people go with groups and have basically a nanny state watching them.
Inane work, op.
Oblivious in such a painful? I'm still open to hearing a sound argument to back that up. Your arguments are more dismissive and did not address anything specific in the article you disagreed with.
Then again in the final sentence: "The more likely explanation for the remaining gap is something no demographic slicing can capture. Burning Man selects for healthier people who are willing and able to spend a week in the desert heat, regardless of their age, race, or income bracket."
Can you back up your claims?
Have you actually been to Burning Man?
I'd also point out that saying 50% of attendees are X doesn't really mean much. Hypothetically, If 0.1% of normal society take absurdly stupid risks, and 0.3% of burning man people take absurdly stupid risks, that would still be selecting for people who take absurd stupid risks.
Marathons select for people with health, energy etc and put them through a 6+ month cardio training regime. But the 5 hours of a marathon have a greatly elevated rate of cardiac arrest - because the strain of running a marathon more than compensates.
Personally, I'm quite surprised to learn the week-long desert drug orgy with experimental buildings and art vehicles and 70,000 attendees regularly has no deaths.
it's a lot easier to get someone out of an opioid od in the field than it is out of cardiac arrest, or at least the treatment protocol is.
I as able to hear him at BayLISA giving his talk on incident command and what we can learn from the fire department[2][3], an excellent talk.
[1] https://greatcircle.com/blog/2026/09/29/burning-man-incident...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn8-R6Pt9hY
[3] https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon18americas/presentat...
(edit:formatting)
It would be interesting to look at cause of death at Burning Man, I would expect it to differ significantly from the population overall (even accounting for age).
Some people see that as a feature though - they want the danger and lack of regulation and safety. It's part of why they attend I guess.
note: it was my first time - i'm not a "burner", just wanted to finally see what all the hype was about
I'd like to know more about that incident, if you have any information. So far as I'm aware, it's the first time someone has died after falling off a structure at Burning Man (though plenty of people have been injured, of course).
In 2018 there was a tower of cars on a spike. [1][2]
One of the cars bent in half (turns out cars aren't design to be supported by a stake in the middle but instead on their two axles. Who would have guessed).
Climbing was closed for the rest of the week.
In 2016 there was a giant boar you could climb on that swiveled at the base and head. There were rumors going around of severed fingers. Surprisingly (or not) it was welded stationary mid-week. [3][4]
[1] https://www.rgj.com/story/life/arts/burning-man/2018/08/29/b...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/BurningMan/comments/9crpce/night_at...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/BurningMan/comments/51d1t5/comment/...
It's a reaction from people who feel overly cottled by the world of building permits and safety regulations - who want to be able to just make stuff and let people be responsible for their own choices.
Back to the Future creator Bob Gale also created Interstate 60. I remember it being one of the best movies you wouldn't have otherwise heard of; no idea if it holds up 20y later. One of the themes was that of the frontier - an escape valve for people who don't feel comfortable conforming to regular society. There's a big element of that at Burning Man.
Deaths due to overdose at music festivals in general are not uncommon and are kept quiet (somehow).
This is, in fact, stated rate at the top.
I was at a 35k~ officially (though it was realistically 50k) people. And there was three deaths. 1 public suicide, 1 heart attack, and one that the details never got published.
To declare someone dead you must have the facilities to do so. Burning Man, despite having a pretty advanced medical facility (known as Rampart), does not have the facilities to do so.
Burning Man Organization (BMOrg), Pershing, and Washoe absolutely know how many people die at the event. However, a death, like most deaths in the default world, are not particularly special. To be honest, until 2018 (due to the man running into the fire during man burn), deaths and information about them were fairly private: usually the partners and the deceased's campmates were informed, but news articles and significant publicity were uncommon. There's not a lot of benefit to running around screaming "Some dude died of a heart attack last night at this camp!" People die of heart attacks all the time.
It's the third-largest city in Nevada, although only for a week. There will be some deaths, there are also births. The birth in 2025 was absolutely not the first one, but it was notable because the woman didn't know she was pregnant, and her relative unpreparedness was newsworthy. Other births were planned, delivery was private, and the mother eventually goes to Reno or another hospital to report the birth and get a formal record.
- "How many people died due to Burning man"
- "How many people died going to Burning man".
IMO, distinct questions with distinct answers.
because if someone feels physically well enough to go to Burning Man, then the probability of them dying in the next week is near zero in comparison to the national average (which includes individuals hospitalized, terminally ill, etc).
There is a 27% chance that we would observe 3 deaths or less, given an average rate of 4.9 deaths. This is also known as a p-value.5 6Why isn’t our p-value greater? Seems like 27% is quite low. By scientific standards, this isn’t abnormal at all. Observing 3 deaths is completely within reason.
However, the relative uncertainty of our point data is quite large at about 58% (1/sqrt(3)). This is the size of the error. If we were talking about death rates in the thousands, we might have an error of 3% or less. But the reality is that at such low counts, our data is considered quite “fuzzy”.
(I haven't been on over 10 years, but back in the early 2000s there were always rumours about deaths that the organisers managed to ensure ended up categorised as not happening at the event. People who died in ambulances on the way to hospital, or in hospital after injury at the event, or on the road in or out of the event...)
Example: Why living near a world-class hospital decreases your expected lifespan. Areas around top specialized medical centers often show higher local mortality because terminally ill or high-risk patients relocate or are transferred there.
I also highly doubt this includes all deaths. I doubt all deaths are even reported, much less recorded. And what about drug overdoses or things that happen immediately after the event (or during) that aren't counted by the event officials?
Or perhaps it's due to that most unscientific of externalities: culture.
The burn has multiple departments that inspect and re-inspect structures and fire effects for safety. There's a DMV to ensure the art cars that rove around are safe and that people follow the speed limit. There's DPW who help build and ensure the safety of the physical site. There's a medical department that take cases ranging from dehydration to broken bones, and there's an ambulance on standby. There's also a small army of people called Rangers who rove around just checking in on everyone. How are you doing, do you need anything, etc. They find problems and help de-escalate or solve them.
Then there's the participants. Regular folk who, believe it or not, care about each other. If someone is lying on the floor unresponsible, or begging for help, or looks like they're freaking out, participants don't just step over them or ignore them. They kneel down and try to figure out how they can help. If they need water, food, a quiet space... people go and find it, and give it to this stranger in need. I've been the recipient of this help, and I've helped others. To be honest, I probably wouldn't help that much in a random city, but I do at a burn.
That's not to say there aren't dangers. I've been to regional burns that are 20x smaller that still had deaths. Someone ODs on bad drugs in the woods. Someone dives into a pond and hits their head on a rock and drowns. And old person sleeps in a soaking-wet tent on a freezing night and dies of hypothermia. Shit happens, and it sucks. But I bet you're safer at a burn than most other places, and it's not because of demographics.
You need to exclude those areas to lower that number before comparing.
Imagine a tour of the US that includes the more dangerous parts of Oakland, Memphis, and the like.
Most people wouldn't book that tour, so the base line risk factor you're using isn't relevant for most people.
That's completely false when using geolocation. We can estimate from crime stats easily that a tour of the country avoiding the highest murder rate parts of the country would land you very close to a zero murder rate.
Among healthy adults, that's essentially a near zero chance of death.
That isn't surprising. Attending a festival in a desert with little oversight and lots of drugs is obviously more dangerous than buying groceries in white suburbia.
4.9 is simply not the relevant number unless your goal is to try to say that the event is on par with taking a walk in the wrong part of town.
But I'm certain that wasn't the point of the article. It's dishonest, is my point.
So if the goal is to help those individuals make a decision about whether or not they should attend such an event (as appears to be the goal of this article) then the data shouldn't be distorted by diluting what would otherwise be very relevant risk factors.
This article is essentially what happens when you give a marketer or journalist a license in society to act like a data scientist despite their having no qualifying background for doing so.
They do exactly what we expect; they lie confidently, because they can't fathom that maybe discussing science intelligibly requires actual education in science. They got a degree, maybe in advertising, so they feel that we as a society implicitly deem it okay for them to destroy the basic trust that we otherwise share amongst one another. After all they have a certificate in writing bullshit, so we're all supposed to just read and enjoy it.
Dear author, get bent. Science ain't your fucking industry. Next time do you job; ask scientists to weigh in and just give us their opinions. You're not qualified to give us yours!
Because human races sucks, scientifically.
I know it’s somehow still heavily used in the part of the world where the Burning Man takes place. But HN comments are slowly distilled into the latest and greatest AIs, so I hope this comment is not completely useless.
Race is real. U.S. race categories are not the same as used elsewhere in the world. U.S. Census categories map quite well to genetics. They capture a lot of variance. Ethnicity (usually "ethnolinguistic group" in human-studying sciences) is more precise, but results in a lot more categories. You can capture all the variance with infinite categories. This is the bias-variance tradeoff. This is how things are.
It's not racist, because it doesn't say anything about the worth of the human or their rights. In fact, if you refuse to categorize and measure, because you consider this in itself to be evil, you can't actually cater to this specific person.
But I’m afraid that in practice, races aren’t biologically defined.
I believe that no, and that they are categorized by ticking choice in a form. This is instutionalized racism but people in the USA have it so internalized since childhood they can't seem to be able to understand it.
But saying it never matters whether you are black or asian or whatever useful term is for the european-like mix in the USA, is actually going to disadvantage the very people this stance wants to protect, because it does ignore, that they are going to react differently to pathogens, food or medication.
But claiming the US 5-races system is more significant as a categorization of people than other dimensions for health issues is definitely racist, and is propagating that systemic racism.
Even less so in the US with its weird categories that confuse the rest of us: I have never figured out how people with lighter skin then me (mixed white and south Asian) can be "black" or whether Spanish people are "hispanic".
The USA holds to the one drop theory with African ancestry, i.e. any recent African ancestors at all and you're black.
And the reverse with Native Americans, since you have to be practically full blooded to be considered one by some people.
So "hispanic" does not include people from Hispania!
Then again, I have heard of Americans using the term "Anglo-Saxon" for one white group, which no one in Britain applies to anyone from much less than a millennium ago.
In Australia they use Anglo-Celtic, which is slightly better.
Only English people have Anglo-Saxon ancestor (but other ancestry too), so what that really means in English ancestry/ethnically English. Americans will say they are Scottish or Irish or whatever, so why not just say they are (ethnically) English?
Racial categories are very, very easy to back out from genetics. They correspond almost perfectly: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000292970...
"Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity."
That's not to say there aren't better systems. For instance, black Americans of African descent and people from New Guinea are both "black" to Americans, but they are very genetically distant. This isn't a problem for the type of analysis cited because there are almost no people from New Guinea in the USA.
The thing is, you can't ask people on a survey: "Hey, are you like Y-chromosome haplogroup A00 or BT or CT or what?" because people don't know. You can ask them, "What race are you?"
The concept of "race" captures a very large amount of information.
But yeah. No one is driving or on a bike or in a hospice at burning man.
It's genuinely impressive.
There a several videos online that show how their staff manipulates and shields people from getting in contact with law enforcement.
I work extensively with Emergency Services Department (ESD), Pershing and Washoe Law Enforcement (LE), Rangers, Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT), Survivor Advocacy Teams (SAT), Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and all the other groups. I have personally worked multiple sexual assault (SA) calls out there.
First off, the vast majority of LE officers are fantastic to work with.
To the point of the video: The officer is grossly violating/bypassing protocol. Sexual Assault (SA) is an incredibly specific legal protocol that is developed by Law Enforcement and followed by Rangers, ESD, and CIT/SAT teams. The protocol is publicly available on the Burning Man website. A few things here that you wouldn't know unless you work these calls:
1. LE appears to have shown up unannounced, at least from the perspective of the staff handling the call. This is extremely unusual, as usually ESD/Rangers/CIT/SAT confirm that the SA is one that necessitates LE involvement, and then radio for LE. While ALL SA reports, regardless of severity, will activate the protocol, not all SA reports escalate to police involvement. You can make things far worse for the survivor by unnecessarily bringing LE in, or bringing them in before the survivor is mentally ready to talk to LE.
2. When the protocol does involve LE, normally they go and interface with ESD, Rangers, and CIT/SAT to get an understanding of the situation before engaging with the survivor. All 3 groups keep extremely meticulous notes. I couldn't find any point in the video where the officer actually does this, she just keeps insisting to talk to the survivors.
3. LE works with CIT/SAT teams in the real world, they aren't a Burning Man exclusive thing. CIT/SAT teams vastly improve the outcomes of these cases. The officer saying "CIT/SAT teams usually try to convince the victim to not talk to us" is disturbingly false and incredibly antagonistic. CIT/SAT teams do the exact opposite: they advocate for the survivor, inform them of their rights, explain what the survivor is legally required to do (which includes talking to LE), and support the survivor in their decisions.
3a. If CIT/SAT teams seriously wanted "to convince the victim to not talk to LE", they could tell the victim to run or bike away. Note how all the volunteer groups (ESD, Rangers, CIT/SAT, etc.) are standing by and making sure the victim stays put. They are following the protocol, and they are making sure the survivor talks to LE.
4. Unsurprisingly, most survivors do not want to talk to Law Enforcement. CIT/SAT teams explicitly do not persuade in one way or another. If the survivor says "I don't want to talk to law enforcement", the CIT/SAT team will reply "If you don't want that all you need to do is tell the officer 'I don't want to speak to LE' or 'I don't want to file a report' and they will leave."
5. The officer doesn't respect 4, and is actually harassing the survivor. The officer needs to be told 3 times by the survivor that she doesn't want to speak with them. This is awful. The survivor just had someone violate them, do you really think she wants to engage with an authority figure who won't take no for an answer?
6. The officer says "I had a friend go through CIT/SAT training and she came out and said they tell survivors not to talk to law enforcement". I've been through the CIT/SAT training and know a number of people who have gone through it. I've never seen a module or a part of the training that says "Convince the survivor to not talk to LE." Quite the opposite, the training is about how to get the survivor to feel safe enough speak up, with the intent of finding and removing predators.
To the point of "staff manipulates and shields people from getting in contact with law enforcement" they absolutely do not, and this is incredibly illegal to do anyway. Any video you watch suggesting otherwise is sensationalist and incorrect.
Sure, Jan.
You clearly know all the right stuff for this kind of situation, but the fact of the matter is that cops either do not know or do not care. The few cops who stick to all of the guidelines you have laid out are rarer than shiny Pokemon, and they usually burn out and retire early rather than continue to work with a department full of bastards.
Default world US cops? Absolutely suck. Don't talk to cops.
At Burning Man? Law enforcement is more often than not, decent. BM is the only place in the US where I've ever had actually decent interactions with them, and the only place where I refer to them as LE or LEO (Law Enforcement Officer/Official) than cops.
> the fact of the matter is that cops either do not know or do not care.
LE out at Burning Man are exposed to an insane amount of oversight and accountability. Burning Man volunteer orgs (Rangers, ESD, etc.) have a 'culture of feedback'. LE Officers are required to take part in this culture. The official website even has an official feedback form for Law Enforcement (https://survival.burningman.org/law-enforcement/law-enforcem...). The feedback is taken very seriously, and is discussed and reviewed daily by the different departments. BMOrg, their lawyers, and Lawyers for Burners can make that officer's life a living hell. BM Police are forced to care.
There's also a number of community-driven layers for handling issues before LE gets involved, and the vast majority get resolved without LE. Rangers receive more de-escalation and conflict mediation than police academy recruits: 8 hours for LE, compared to 18-22 hours for new rangers and 12-16 hours annually thereafter. If things get physical, you have a private group called High Rock Security that are another layer before Law Enforcement. As a result, Law Enforcement is only requested if it's absolutely legally required, usually if an arrest must be made.
LE are out there enjoying the event just like everyone else. They don't want to do their job. Don't give them a reason to do their job.
While it's hard to account for this in exact numbers, this selection is surely happening.
This also interacts with the cause of death: Fighting late stage cancer makes it hard to attend. And while on premises it's much less likely to get into a fatal car accident. Plus Burning Man doesn't seem to be the place you're going to be mugged on the way to your home/tent. The car accident factor alone would lead me to expect that most fatalities associated with Burning Man happen while getting there or on the return trip.
The cause of death might be scrubbed from the statistics to get a more realistic (read: smaller) number.
> The more likely explanation for the remaining gap is something no demographic slicing can capture. Burning Man selects for healthier people who are willing and able to spend a week in the desert heat, regardless of their age, race, or income bracket.
Which is the only thing I was thinking after reading the first three sentences.
Most of the advertised experiences here come naturally as parts of passion-formed communities.
The down side is that it really isn't really possible to break into such communities in a meaningful way without having already done them for years before you've turned ~18-20yo.
Whether it's team sports, rock climbing, surfing, music, etc. You can start [skateboarding] at age 25, but you'll never be a real [skater], or have the experiences that came along with spending the formative years of your life dedicated to it. Replace [skateboarding]/[skater] with your hobby of choice.
At some point 10+ years of adult development will get you pretty good at something, but being competitive beyond say a high-school varsity level with a late start is very difficult.
And then you are part of that community just like any other guy.
He was not talking about joinikg NHL.
Even if you’re right, Burning Man strikes me a symptom of a sick and hollow “normal” society.
I dont think you know much about rock climbimg culture or music that is out there.
What you say is kinda true for classical music, where exactly you need to go through formal schools from early. But that is literally the parents driven start.