Say what you will about the Pumpkin 12.Was it immature for grown men and women to run naked through the streets of Boulder late on Halloween night wearing nothing but carved gourds and running shoes? Yes.
Was it a violation of the law? Yes.
But should the 12 people arrested this Halloween for indecent exposure really be forced to register as sex offenders if convicted? Come on.
The arrests constitute selective enforcement and the potential penalty the streakers face is far out of proportion to the crime.
A little context is helpful. The Naked Pumpkin Run has become a Boulder tradition over the past decade. It is one of the quirky things that makes Boulder the odd haven that it is. Organizers have a website, and the “run” was even listed in advance in the local newspaper.
This year — without adequate warning, in our opinion— police decided to bust a handful of the approximately 100 runners. For years, they had looked the other way.
The law is the law, there is no doubt. These people were, for reasons known only to the naked, reveling in the illegality of sprinting in the buff. They knew exactly what they were doing.
However, we do note that they seemed to be a peaceful crowd, and environmentally conscious as well. The discarded pumpkins were set to be composted after the event.
Police gave only lukewarm advance warning that there might be arrests this year. In one story published in the Boulder Daily Camera before the run, Police Chief Mark Beckner said his department would not send officers specifically to bust revelers.
But, according to the story, he said officers who saw naked runners had the option to enforce the law.
Given the entrenched nature of the event, police ought to have made it clear on numerous occasions that participants could be arrested and possibly required to register as a sex offender.
Furthermore, it’s not as if public nudity is uncommon in Boulder. In July, a group of 60 naked cyclists pedaled through Boulder in the fifth annual Naked Bike Ride. It was a protest against U.S. dependence on oil. Over the years, a few people were arrested in connection with the event, but none this year.
The people arrested on Halloween, dubbed the Pumpkin 12 by a Rocky Mountain News report, are scientists, a doctoral candidate, a restaurant cook, a planetarium docent, and University of Colorado students. These folks seem to have promising futures ahead of them and would be be immeasurably harmed by being tagged as sex offenders.
We hope the court system injects a measure of common sense into the situation. Drop the charges or plead them down. Don’t wreck the lives of these revelers in order to make a point.
