I hear the special today is Rack of Unicorn.

As a regular reader of Boing Boing, the volume of posts like this is starting to disturb me. Isn't this the same kind of fear mongering that the left decries about the right? When police intervention with the most remote chance of being flagged as 'abuse of power' or 'limiting rights' is raised to a pedestal in Fox News-style outrage aren't we just using the same media tools that we ridicule? Maybe it is the vitriol in the language or the automatically assumed anti-police position that I'm reacting to rather than the fact that Boing Boing is bringing these things to light.

These were not STUDENTS looking up their books for classes, these were employees of a competitor documenting the store's inventory. The fact that they were students is not the key point here and the way this post was written as if Harvard co-ops are calling the police to arrest poor students who are just trying to learn is absurd. What is the co-op to do? Let the competitors gather this data while potentially being in the way of paying customers or who knows what (we don't have the full story here)? Or should the co-op have grabbed large sticks and run these competitors out of their store vigilante-style so blue wouldn't be involved?