Police Cite Parasites on Protestor

February 22, 2008 – 6:34 pm

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: lice, treesitting, UCSC — admin @ 6:34 pm

Yet again the court date for the case against the tree-sit protestors has been delayed (this time to March 6), but, as they say, good things come with time, and it’s given us a chance to comb through the documents surrounding the case.
The files contain a litany of complaints against the protestors, including reports that they’ve tried, and failed, to empty buckets of waste in the science building toilets, and reports that the protestors have urinated on the buildings on Science Hill.
But what really sticks out is the written testimony of a police officer who reported that one of the activists who was arrested was, disturbingly, “infested with lice.”
Yes, lice. Pediculus humanis capitis, the parasite that infests the human scalp and deposits its filthy brood in the hair of its prey, has, according to the court document, begun nesting in the hair of one of the former tree dwellers.
However, because it’s a court document and not a journal entry, we don’t get to learn how the officer discovered that the protestor had lice, or why he thought it was important to make a report about it.
The document doesn’t tell us, for example, if the officer realized that the activist had lice when his head-locking armpit began roiling with parasites (if he even put the activist in a headlock) or if he decided to comb the protestor after arresting him, just to check for nits.
If this reinforces the vision of activists as parasite-infested hippies, or if UCSC thinks portraying the activists as a disease vector is a good legal strategy, might be revealed when the case is tried in court on March 6, along with the issue of, you know, whether treesitting is protected under the constitution or not.
Unless, that is, someone sets the date back even further.