The number of reported offenses during this year’s Austin City Limits Music Festival decreased from past years, according to an Oct. 18 city press release.
There were 67 theft reports during Weekend One last year, according to a 2023 Austin Police Department press release. This year, the number of reported thefts went down to 44.
Elijah Myrick, a special operations lieutenant at APD in charge of interior ACL law enforcement operations, said the decrease in thefts over the years is not from stopping individuals from committing petty thefts, such as pickpocketing, but rather a “targeted” arrest of criminal operations who work collaboratively at large festivals.
“If we get a report, it’s not like petty theft,” Myrick said. ”We understand that it’s probably a larger group participating, and so we really focus down and move a lot of resources into that.”
Advertising junior Jessica North said she believes her phone was stolen on Sunday of Weekend One in a mosh pit after waiting for four to five hours for house musician Dom Dolla.
“It was crazy, and I was gripping everything, but I had my phone in my pocket during a mosh pit, which is not smart, but I had my hand on it, so it was fine,” North said. “I thought it was protected. But then, I felt it get lifted out of my pocket. I knew immediately whenever it was gone.”
North said her friends tried to use the Find My iPhone app to trace the location of her phone, but the next time she could see her phone’s location was the next morning when it was on its way to Houston. After the phones are stolen, they’ll often be taken to ‘hub’ cities like Houston or Miami, Myrick said.
Henry Ward, an aerospace engineering and Plan II freshman, said he lost his phone at ACL in 2021. However, around two months later, he received a call from APD.
“I thought it was a spam caller,” Ward said. “(The police were) like, ‘We intercepted a shipment of (around) 1,000 phones in Miami, unchipped to be sent to South America and be sold on secondhand marketing. We think yours is one of them,’ and I was like, ‘What?’”
After arriving at the hub cities, the phones are typically sold to a middleman, who then ships them overseas to somewhere they can be jailbroken and sold, Myrick said.
“I’m not going to be able to use your credit card and ID, you’re not going to be able to use mine, but I can take your cell phone and trade it to someone for $200,” Myrick said.
Myrick advises future attendants to be aware of their surroundings, to avoid putting phones in their back pockets, and instead have them in front pockets or other bags such as fanny packs. He said he hopes next year’s festival will be just as successful in lowering theft rates, as his team is always looking for room for improvement.
“Every single day at ACL, we meet and see what we can do better for the next day,” Myrick said. “All the public safety — fire, EMS, the private security, all the interior operations, all the way from the people who run the stage. After the festival, we have a debrief: What could we do better?”
