It's not really surprising that an event like the Roskilde Festival attracts various kinds of "shady" people as well. While the police have said a number of times that the overall crime level compared to a normal city the size of Roskilde Festival (i.e. a city of around 130000 people!) is rather low (especially considered the amount of alcohol involved), Roskilde unfortunately does have its share of violence, theft and other crimes.
In this article I will talk a little bit about simple ways to keep your things from getting stolen and try to avoid too much paranoia at the same time.
All this is of course based on personal, subjective experience, thoughts and what i think is "common sense". Your mileage may vary...
If in doubt or if you need something more objective, ask one of the police officers who are walking around many of the more crowded areas of the camping and festival site. They are there to protect you! They are quite friendly and they also like to limbo every now and then :)
The most obvious piece of advice is probably:
Use the luggage deposit!
For everything really important that you don't need during the festival (or at least not very often) like appartment or car keys, plane- and train-tickets, your passport, credit and other plastic cards, part of your cash, the luggage deposit is probably the safest place at the whole site. The only downside is, that it can take some time queueing up if you need to get something from the deposited luggage and especially at the end of the festival when everyone is leaving the queues get quite long.
While depositing things is easy, it's a little more tricky to protect the things in your tent. One thing that has worked particularly well for my friends and me is:
Keep your tent in utter and complete chaos!
It's quite effective and much fun at the same time :-)
One of the first things I do after having set up my tent is I turn my backpack upside down and completely empty it. The people who break into tents understandably don't seem to want to spend too much time searching for things they can use. My tent was broken into at least once at nothing was stolen!
If your tent has a vestibule area, putting things like festival chairs, beer crates or other things from your camp into it will help even more (and protect chairs and crates as well).
On the other hand, under no circumstances keep any kind of fully packed "interesting looking" bag, especially handbag-type bags and small backpacks, in your tent. If you have a small bag that you plan to take to the festival area every day with all the things you need in it (i.e. mobile phone, camera, sunglasses, purse etc), it's very likely to get stolen if someone breaks into your tent. Unpack such a bag if you leave it at the camp an noone of your friends is at the camp either.
If such a bag is stolen from your tent, look at the side of the pathways within 100 meters so so of your tent. There is a good chance that the thief will just quickly take the bag from your tent, look through it while walking away, take whats interesting and then throw it away. If you find the bag, the valuables will be gone but you will have the bag itself and probably most of the other contents as well. In 2004, one girl from our camp had her handbag stolen from her tent and after she found it only 20 meters away from our camp, only her sunglasses were gone.
The other type of packed bag not to have lying in your tent is a big packed backpack (or whatever bag you have) with all your stuff in it. This happens when people are planning to leave just after going to some concert or if they have just arrived. If you just arrived, take the time to unpack, if you plan to leave, pack later or use the baggage deposit. Especially sunday evening, there are special baggage desposits at the agoras for people planning to leave in the evening. I once actually saw a guy walking up to a tent near our camp, open it, quickly take a large backpack out of it and walk away. I had no idea whose tent that was but it turned out later, it was not his tent.
Keep things separate!
A good way of minimizing the damage of theft is to keep things separate. The things that are valuable to a thief are not the same that are valuable to you! Keep things that are mainly valuable to you, like tickets, keys all sorts of plastic cards, your passport or I.D. separate from things like cash, cameras, mobile phones. The thieves at the festival (I guess) are after simple, easy to move things like cash, expensive single pieces of clothing or sunglasses and electronics. While there is of course a chance that they will use keys to break into your flat (especially if you live near copenhagen), I'd say that chance is quite limited, and they won't know where you parked your car either.
Leave stuff at home!
Only bring to the festival what you really need. Look through your wallet or purse and remove everything that you don't need at the festival. Leave keys at home, especially company keys or car keys if you don't take your car. What you don't bring can't get stolen, lost or broken.
Keep an eye open!
Camping in a larger group is not only great fun but also has lots of practical advantages. One of these advantages is the ability to keep an eye out for each other. Forming a camp, even with people you just met at the festival will reduce the chance of someone stealing things from your camp. The larger the camp, the larger the chance that there is someone at the camp at any given moment. Also, get to know your neigbours, have a few beers with them. It will come naturally that once you know who lives next door you will likely also notice if something fishy is going on and your neighbours will do the same.
One problem to keep in mind however, is that thieves will most probably not look like thieves! Someone stealing a bag from a tent will dress and behave in a way like he or she owns the bag. The guy I mentioned earlier whom I saw stealing a bag from a tent was mid-twenties, wore some band t-shirt and looked like a "normal" festival guest in every way.
One last thing I would really advise against is "protecting" your tent with things like locks! Locks provide zero protection against someone breaking in, will only arouse suspicion and cause the thieve to cut open the tent to get in.
I hope the things I wrote above will help you a little to protect your stuff from people who came for reasons other than partying. All in all, I would not consider theft a big problem at Roskilde Festival..but it can happen. And with a little common sense you reduce the risk a lot and also minimize possible damage. Don't get too paranoid, enjoy the festival...
Axel
P.S.: Again, I'd really like to hear about experiences of other people with theft and how to protect against it. I will update this article every now and then if interesting new things come up.
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