Apropos of Scorpio – the Pumpkin Run

Earlier this week, I posted a link to a Wall Street Journal article about how the city of Boulder, CO took some extreme measures to stop the annual Pumpkin Run — wherein the participants put a jack-o-lantern on their head and streak across town. This had been going on for about 10 years before it was stopped this year.

The WSJ article painted a grim picture of a police department that was ready to use the SWAT team on nude joggers, and prosecute them for a sex offense. Because this seemed so outrageous, I called the Boulder PD and talked to Sarah Huntley, their public affairs person, to see what was going on. She gave me a different version of the events than the one reported in the Journal. It turns out that the the same night as the Pumpkin Run was planned, there was another event, called the Mall Crawl. She described this as a lot of people getting drunk and roaming the streets. Because daylight savings time ended Halloween night, that provided an extra hour of the bars being open. The police were concerned about things getting out of hand; and also concerned that a drunk mob and a bunch of naked people might not be a good mix. She said the SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) team was on backup but was not deployed. The country sheriff’s patrol was also on call, but not utilized. So that explains the SWAT team.

As for sex offender status: conviction for indecent exposure, a crime in the Colorado state code, automatically includes “sex offender” status — which basically will mar a person’s reputation for life. (This is now true of many states, with legislatures all too happy to equate “sex” and “crime.”) From what I gathered, the police chief recognized the gravity of this. Last year when 12 citations were issued for indecent exposure at the Pumpkin Run, all 12 were pleaded over to disorderly conduct, which does not include being listed as a sex offender; and neither the police nor the prosecutors objected. She said that they would prefer a local indecent exposure ordinance to prosecute under, but there isn’t one in existence yet; the closest law that fits the facts of the circumstance is the state statute.

Huntley said that the police chief is not against naked stuff, per se. She gave an example — there is a World Naked Bike Ride (the WNBR, which is a fossil fuels protest) that had an event in Boulder this year and nobody got ticketed or arrested. However, the Pumpkin Run receives complaints from residents, which puts the police in the position of having to enforce the law. It’s a difficult spot to be in; everyone knows we’re born naked, and even Pope John Paul II felt that the nude body was a form of art created by God.

Based on the facts as they were told to me, the WSJ piece was a hatchet job, omitting the actual point of view of the police. I can’t prove that everything Sarah Huntley said is “the truth,” but everything she said was consistent with the available facts and accounted for them without contradiction or hesitation. The real issue is that the Wall Street Journal did not represent the police department’s point of view.

This is the new Fox News Wall Street Journal (which is now owned by News Corporation, parent company of Fox). Historically the Journal’s news department is one of the most dependable around (and their editorial page is Satan’s scribe). Even writers who work for the paper will tell you this.

This is often what happens when you fact check an article in the mainstream media. I used to write for a thing called Lies of Our Times, which would deconstruct articles in the NY Times, and it’s disturbing what you learn from this process. Were I teaching Journo 101, we would start with this kind of exercise — pick a piece and take it apart and see what it’s made of. This article in the Wall Street Journal turns out to be a lot less than factual.