On Tuesday night, sixteen students with the University of Maryland branch of Students for a Sensible Drug Policy participated in a non-violent direct action to protest police arrests of students for petty drug offenses. Waving at security cameras and looking generally suspicious, the group walked up to the fourth floor of the Comcast Center parking garage. They smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and acted as if they were under the influence of drugs. Within ten minutes one squad car and a student police officer on bicycle, alerted by those manning the security cameras, descended on the parking garage and confronted the students. Minutes later two more cars arrived as back-up.
The scene was tense, but somewhat comical. After several minutes of uncomfortable silence, one student stood out of the line-up and began talking to the officers.
"My friends and I are sick and tired of getting stopped, arrested and searched for simply having fun on campus. This is our campus; we are students here; but every time I see a police car I feel like a criminal." The group's self-appointed police liaison stressed that the point of the action was not to be confrontational, or make the officers life hard. The group was simply having fun, and, with nothing illegal on them, the students were openly objecting to how the police seemed to be working to always break up their fun. Almost all of them could name at least one or two friends who had been arrested for possession of a controlled substance or drug paraphernalia. Two had, in fact, been stopped and forced to the ground while walking on University Boulevard less then a week earlier, only to be released when they were found not to be holding anything illegal.
The officers responded that they were just doing their job. Whether or not they liked the laws. Maintaining that no one was simply being arrested for having fun, they ran down a list of misdemeanors on which many students are arrested. "It is unusual for people to be walking around in big groups on campus. Can't you go to a pool hall to have fun," the officer continued. Many of the students complained that their actions were being criminalized simply because they were "out of the ordinary."
The officers collected identification from the students, but, not smelling any suspicious odors, soon released them. The confrontation was cathartic, allowing students to vent at the police for their friends, like the president of SSDP, who had been arrested, threatened with expulsion and made to take weekly drug tests. While the group agreed that students need to work with police to keep the campus safe, many like the police liaison, "see police as machines with a gun and a badge." Consequently there is too much hostility and antagonism between the two groups for there to be any cooperation. The message to police was clear. "Stop arresting us for having fun, because we are all people here, and that is how we need to act."