Is it against their religion to consume alcohol? Were they having a big shootout? I understand the underage drinking, but why not focus on groups that are violent?
Police do not want to deal with groups that could be violent. They could get violent. Also they could be accused of discrimination. Arresting Amish is safe. There are Amish in jail for hate crimes (shaving heads). They are serving longer sentences than some murderers.
Police everywhere will raid a beer bust out in a field if it gets too big and they pick up wind of it. This is only of interest because it’s Amish youths. But hey, the temptation those kids are under must be tremendous.
It depends on the sect. The New Order Amish are the most conservative and tend to be against all forms of alcohol consumption. But other sects of Amish will drink wine or beer especially on special occasions although over consumption and drunkenness is not acceptable.
http://www.amish365.com/alcohol-and-the-amish/
http://amishamerica.com/do_the_amish_dr/
Some Amish make and drink homemade wine and beer (they are German after all) and some Amish in Lancaster County also grow tobacco as it is a lucrative crop and a few also smoke tobacco, but in pipes rather than cigarettes. For some reason they think that cigarettes are “worldly” while smoking pipes, not so much.
http://amishamerica.com/do-amish-smoke/
I was at a shopping center near where I worked in Manheim, PA (Lancaster County) where there is a lot of Amish and saw a young Amish guy coming out of the Wine & Spirits store with two boxes of boxed wine and going back to his horse drawn buggy. This shopping center BTW had designated parking spots and hitching posts for their Amish customers. I came across both Amish and Mennonites shopping at the Weis Markets grocery store and at the hardware store.
Another day coming out the grocery store I saw an Amish buggy parked and in the back of the buggy was two bright red gasoline cans. It could have been for kerosene however.