A year ago today, police officers in Racine, Wisconsin detained and ticketed 442 people at an electronic music party being held in a town banquet hall. Dustin Block of The Journal Times wrote an article to mark the anniversary, calling it the night that "Racine hit bottom on the hip scale."

While this may be true, its unlikely that the nationwide public uproar which followed those tickets was a result of exposing Racine's lack of urban trendiness. A combination of drugs (the scourge of our society), kids (the innocent victims) and electronic music (the new music that parents just don't understand) is enough to make any politician's pen wet with anticipation and a civil libertarian clutch their copy of the Bill of Rights a little tighter.

The public at large isn't going out of their way to defend a situation like that. Stranger still, it happened in a relatively small town far away from and previously unknown to most of the United States. Both those involved and those watching the situation unfold from the sidelines believed that it would be a long hard legal slog of the heavy hand of local standards versus a group nobody really cared about. The actual events were quite different.

This case seemed to garner so much attention because of a totality of the circumstance test was used by police to issue the tickets. Officers on the scene simply assumed that because drugs were present, and several people at the party were in possession of them and acting disorderly, that all 442 people who weren't arrested on specific crimes should reasonably have been aware of the actions of the other 441 and deserved a $1000 ticket, in effect for not leaving the party before it was busted.

People who would dismiss the story as something that happened to "those ravers" or "stupid kids" get drawn in this, what Dalhia Lithwick calls an "inference of guilt" rule. Nobody wants to put themselves into the shoes of a drug dealer, mostly because very few people want to stop believing that they are good, law abiding citizens. To have something in common with the protesters, drug dealers, and illegal immigrants who often feature in high-profile civil liberty cases is unthinkable!

But when its obvious from all the stories that these four hundred people have done nothing wrong but dance in the company of miscreants, things change. Readers and listeners quickly draw analogies to their own life , for instance, imaging if they were to get a ticket because one vehicle double parked just because they were on the same block. Suddenly its a case that everybody can relate to.

To be continued...

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