ODDLY ENOUGH

ODDLY ENOUGH

Nudity concerns prompt new rules

BOULDER, Colo.

In response to neighborhood reports of a topless gardener, the housing authority in a Colorado town plans to amend its rules so that tenants cover up when they’re outside.

Robert Pierce, of Boulder, says he’ll fight changes that would keep his wife from gardening outside topless, which is legal under state and city law.

“They’re making a big mistake,” he said.

Boulder Housing Partners Executive Director Betsey Martens didn’t return a phone call late last week seeking details on how covered residents would have to be.

She told the Daily Camera newspaper that people have complained for years about the couple often going outside wearing only thong underwear.

Several passers-by called Boulder police when Catharine Pierce, 52, tended to her yard wearing only a yellow thong and pink gloves. Police decided she wasn’t breaking any laws.

Robert Pierce said the new rules wouldn’t discourage the couple. “We’ll stay the way we have to stay,” he said.

The city council is scheduled in April to consider expanding the city’s anti-nudity ordinance, but a draft proposal to make it an offense for women to go topless in public was removed.

City spokesman Patrick von Keyserling said the housing authority is a separate entity and that the city can’t dictate the agency’s rules.

Cops sorry for pounding couple’s door 50 times

NEW YORK

Cheesecake in hand, the police commissioner personally apologized Friday for the 50 or so mistaken, door-pounding visits that police have made to the home of a bewildered elderly Brooklyn couple in the past eight years.

It seems a glitch in computer records had led them over and over to Walter and Rose Martin’s modest home in the Marine Park neighborhood, about 7 miles southeast of the Brooklyn Bridge.

The most recent intrusion came last Tuesday, with officers pounding on both the front and back doors, yelling “Police, open up!”

On Thursday, detectives from the NYPD’s Identity Theft Squad went to see the Martins again — this time to apologize. “And we wanted to be sure perps weren’t using that address for identity theft,” NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne told The Associated Press on Friday.

The detectives told 82-year-old Rose and 83-year-old Walter that Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly had ordered them to solve the problem, which started eight years ago and was first reported in the New York Daily News.

To bring home the sincerity of the NYPD’s contrition, Kelly showed up Friday at the Martin’s house with a gift: New York cheesecake.

Associated Press