(Guest editorial from the Sacramento Union)
It has been more than 18 months and the University of California, Berkeley, police are still puzzling what to do about non-students with such street names as “Skunk Boy,” “Cricket” and “Dumpster Muffin” who have been living in the oak trees near Cal’s Memorial Stadium where the university plans to build a $140 million sports center.

The tree squatters are protesting the development, not only by occupying the trees, but also by haranguing passersby and, occasionally, dumping buckets of human waste on them.

Last week UC Police Chief Victoria Harrison went up in a cherry-picker to beseech the tree sitters to come down peaceably. The university directed arborists to remove wooden platforms, tarps, traverse lines, victuals and the waste buckets. One of the Tree Hippies, a 19-year-old female non-student, is alleged to have bitten one of the arborists.

Berkeley might as well be on the other side of the world, considering the university’s bizarre tolerance for the tree trespassers and their antics. We think it is time that the UC police, who are funded with our tax dollars, start acting like grown-up law-enforcers, not like devotees of Mahatma Gandhi.

A university spokesman announced last week that, “if people (the Tree Hippies) are going to put up a fight, we are going to let them stay.” Can you imagine any place else on the planet where trespassers would be permitted to sit in trees for year-and-a-half, sometimes dropping urine and excreta bombs on persons coming too lose?

Apparently, it is considered bad form and inhumane in “Berserkeley” for law enforcement to forcibly extract such trespassers. Yet, it is not disturbing in the slightest to have bystanders showered with offal.

Memo to UC Berkeley: Flush these annoying human tree lemurs out now, by any appropriate non-lethal means.