Letters to the Editor

Students should resist police harassment with the vote

Undercover prohibition agents? With fake University IDs? Individuals held criminally liable merely for having their names on a list of officers? Even if they may not have been present? This is truly over the top. What kind of town are we living in?

And where's the outrage among students? The escalating harassment of club officers and other students by an ever more aggressive police department is the direct result of students' apathetic response to past provocations, which has emboldened their enemies in local government.

The fact that the police department has been able to afford such a Big Brother operation shows that its budget is too large and needs to be cut, while the fact that the leadership of the force was willing to engage in totalitarian tactics of this kind shows that there is a need for a change of personnel. Such forms can be undertaken only by the borough council, which controls hiring, promotions, and salaries of the police force, as well as its overall budget. And the borough council will not move to correct police excesses and abuses unless students vote in municipal elections.

Members of the council are generally elected with a couple of thousand votes total and margins of victory of a few hundred. If half or even a third of all eligible students voted, an out-of-control police department could soon be reined in. Had students begun to defend themselves at the polls five years ago, after the passage of the first anti-student ordinance (the open container ordinance), or even just three years ago, after the introduction of the second anti-student ordinance (the Avalon ordinance, not yet enacted but likely to be so this month), dozens of student arrests and scores of summonses could have been prevented.

How much more harassment will it take before students decide enough is enough? Don't wait for the next outrage by the prohibitionazis in local government — closing clubs as "public nuisances"? confiscating club property under "civil forfeiture" laws? — before registering to vote locally. Professor John Burgess '69 Philosophy Department