I think you all know my position on hippies.
But this program by the University of Colorado Police Department is one of the creepiest, and dare I say, evil, things I have ever seen inside the borders of our country.
Apparently the students there all got together on April 20 (Get it, 4/20, haha, hah haha! Oh, and that's also Hitler's birthday.) and demonstrated on some field in favor of legalization of weed. The cops put up signs saying they were observing it and you could get in trouble. So they took all kinds of pictures. And now they've put those pictures up online offering a $50 reward for identifying the hardcore criminals in the pictures. Who were doing what? Attacking police? Threatening police? Using nasty language and making faces? Nope, smoking weed.
Fuck.
Really, these people were not walking through a mall subjecting families to their nerdy desire to smoke weed, they were only with other people who wanted to do the same. And I guarantee there are more people smoking at half the concerts that come to Boulder, but of course they are not making a political statement, so they're probably not filmed and then put online to be indentified by your peers and people who don't like you.
So pre-Lawrence, could the police have filmed a gay pride parade, and then put those pictures online and asked for help identifying criminal sodomizers? I know, I know, I don't put the right to smoke weed and wear dirty clothes in the same category with the right to sleep with who you want to sleep with or marry who you want to marry, but I do put it in the same league.
I don't know enough about criminal procedure law to know whether this is legal, but I do know that we have a duty to publicize this and make it politically unacceptable.
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I read another news article on this subject--the people in the discussion thread were unclear as to whether they'd be charged with marijuana use/possession or simply trespass. Either way, I agree with you--I think this can pretty clearly be differentiated from other video surveillance IDs that I do agree with, such as that guy who got busted for hurling an iceball at Giants Stadium some time ago. The most obvious factor is the risk of harm--the hippies harm no liberty or property interest (though they do harm my aesthetic sensibilities) while the iceball-hurlers and the rioters cause damage.
I would argue, though, that you don't have an entirely unbiased opinion on the subject.
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