So, a couple days ago cops in Portland, Oregon did the right thing in a rare situation. It was immortalized on the PPD twitter feed:

Portland – Police to 2100 block of NW Kearney St – report of suspicious circumstances – male walking down the street pulling a suitcase with a female zipped up inside of it

— Portland OR Alerts (@pdxalerts) June 10, 2018

NW Kearney Update – Officers made contact with the subjects – officers reporting the female is riding around in the suitcase willingly – all units clearing

— Portland OR Alerts (@pdxalerts) June 10, 2018

Now, I’m all for consensual fun, and if you wanna ride around in a suitcase, you do you, right? But I also get why this was reported. If you do a google search for “portland police alert woman suitcase” you get some seriously not okay stuff all over the first page. Worse, it’s not just multiple reports of the same case, you get links to reports of separate, unrelated incidents. (People with multiple treatment resistant faith in humanity can have it cured right there on that google page.)

As entertaining as it might be for the people doing suitcase transportation, the rest of us don’t always want to be part of your role-play, especially unwittingly. If you get off on the idea that people will think you’re a kidnapper/kidnap victim, you’re roping in others without consent and risking seriously emotional consequences for those around you. Please don’t do that, eh? Also, if you set up the scenario so that your fun gets the cops called, that’s just wasting cop time and resources, which is also in the not cool category.

Since I couldn’t find follow up info contextualizing the suitcase riding I can’t be sure the woman wasn’t partially zipped up with head and arms hanging out yelling, “Whooppee! Go faster! Go faster!” with a smile on her face. In that case, you’re just being very, very Portland and there’s no roping anyone into any role-playing. (And Freud the people who would call the cops on someone for that.) So I’m not making definitive statements about these two people, just a general one about the ethics of roping other people into your activities.

On the other hand, while I frequently criticize cops who escalate interactions with the public instead of deescalating them, this shows cops doing it right. Whatever the story is here (and we don’t know, there has been no news story about it that I can find and though I’m fully aware of how to request more information from PPD I don’t feel like bothering), even in the worst case scenario where people were publicly roleplaying a kidnapping or something similar, if things are actually non-criminal and the cops have done their welfare check, it’s time to clear out. That’s just what they did.