MOOD INDIGO

The Cambridge police are engaged in their lusty autumnal campaign against student parkers, a campaign which is doubly stimulated by a state-wide move to stringently enforce the various auto-mobile laws.

In the past, the town constabulary has followed the happy-go-lucky system of distributing scores of blue tags, and subsequently fining in many instances only those who were sufficiently honest or uniformed to turn in their tags at the police station. Although this situation has occurred through administrative difficulties within the police department--either inherent ones or those due to the recently criticized "general senility" of the department--it cannot be regarded as either desirable or fair.

This year, in such an intensive drive throughout the State, every effort must be made to remedy this inefficiency. Haphazardness is nowhere so intolerable as in the enforcement of laws. If the situation is so complicated that the entire Cambridge Police Department is unable to cope with it uniformly and generally, the fault lies with the law, and not with the situation. The surest way to kill an unfair or an unjust law is to endeavor to enforce it, an eventuality best illustrated by Prohibition. Perhaps it is this prospect that leads the city to apply the parking law to students by the crude technique of random samples.