LAWRENCE, Kansas – I usually reserve my shots for topics related to television, sports or both. I’m not an especially political person and would rarely comment on anything in political realm, but when I heard the remarkably bizarre story of Senator Larry Craig‘s “encounter” with an undercover police officer in a Minneapolis airport, I decided to see what all the fuss was about.

At a time when technology has made information available like never before, it took little effort on my part to track down the police report of this supposed “incident,” and I still fail to understand why Craig honestly believed that no one would find out about his arrest. Did he really think it would just go away?

I’m hardly sympathetic to politicians, celebrities, athletes or any others for whom intense scrutiny is simply part of their jobs. It goes with the territory. So, when those individuals use judgment that would be deemed poor by any standard, it’s hard to have much sympathy for them. Yet they do it anyway, knowing full well that sooner or later it’ll hit the fan.

In the case of Senator Craig, who has since announced his resignation from the United States Senate, I’ve actually begun to have the rare thought that he might have actually been wronged by the police and the subsequent fallout from this incident.

Despite his guilty plea and the unending public commentary claiming wrongdoing on his part, the police report is based more on extrapolation via stereotype than any real “lewd conduct.” Some key passages of the report contain assumption and inference:

“My experience has shown that individuals engaging in lewd conduct use their bags to block the view from the front of the stall.” “Craig tapped his right foot. I recognized this as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct.”

The remaining actions noted in the report indicate that Craig moved his foot under the wall dividing the two stalls, touching the foot of the undercover officer, and sliding his hand on the underside of that wall. Granted, I may be more open-minded than the arresting officer, but I find it rather unsettling that it takes so little to be charged with “Interference with Privacy” and “Disorderly Conduct.” After all, for what is perceived as a sexual offense, the man did nothing remotely sexual.

I am certainly not naive enough to rule out the possibility that Craig might have been seeking to engage in what could legitimately be considered “lewd conduct,” but from the report, none of his actions constituted the complaint. Even if he was trying to pick up the officer, Craig was no more at fault than any male trying to pick someone up at a bar. The only difference is that the officer “moved [his] foot up and down slowly,” in an apparent attempt to show interest in Craig. If a person isn’t interested in a perceived advance, he or she has plenty of ways to indicate that. The fact that the officer was deliberately trying to induce a reaction out of Craig only adds ammunition to the entrapment debate.

It is one thing to be caught in the act (see George Michael, Pee Wee Herman, etc.), but when officers are arresting people who have committed no crime, I think it should give us all pause as to their true objective. If a person is drunk, has car keys in hand, sits in the driver’s seat but never turns on the car, do you arrest him for DUI? I don’t think so. Unfortunately for Senator Craig, neither the media nor his party seem to care whether he, in fact, committed any real wrongdoing. Indeed, such ignorance of the facts may be the biggest crime of all.

Filed under: Opinion/Editorial