HOMECOMING: Tping, a harmless prank or malicious mischief?
By David Alcalay,
Bluedevilhub.com Staff–
Homecoming week is coming to a close, but the toilet paper flow has just got started, and no front yard is safe.
Considered a tradition, each year students leave their houses in the late hours to “TP” the houses of both friends and enemies. Come morning, the residents of the targeted houses wake to find every branch and bush of their yard covered with sheets of toilet paper.
Senior Emily Torbert has been TPed twice before.
“I was a little annoyed,” Torbert said. “[The toilet paper] just sat there for a few months.”
Many people consider TPing a harmless prank, but TPing could be considered vandalism, according to California Penal Code Section 594c, resulting in up to a year in jail and a $1000 fine.
Keirith Briesenick, Davis Police Department School Resource Officer, doesn’t think TPing is always vandalism though.
“It can be but it isn’t necessarily,” Briesenick said.
Briesenick said that though she has never caught a student in the act of TPing, she has encountered TPed houses many times, even encountering houses that have been not only covered in toilet paper, but sprayed with whipped cream or graffiti.
Unfortunately, TPing doesnt always turn out to be a friendly, harmless, prank. In the fall of 2011, retired Davis Senior High band director Fred Lange was TPed but because he was disabled was unable to clean it up on his own.
