Students from Stadium High School's Darfur Action Club are staging a "displacement camp" at Washington-Hoyt Elementary School overnight tonight. They'll sleep in cardboard boxes and have minimal food and water, to simulate conditions in a Sudanese refugee camp. Group organizer Luke Kneeshaw said he expects 50 to 70 students. The point, he says is to raise awareness and educate about the genocide happening in Darfur.

Tacoma Police Department’s Tow Day program is winning fans, both individual and civic.

For Tow Day, officers take printed lists of common parking infractions and head for blocks plagued by abandoned cars and illegal parkers. Officers mark the rules the vehicles are breaking, stick the notices on windshields and come back a week later. Any vehicle still in violation earns a trip on a tow truck, at the owner’s expense.

In Tacoma, the first sweep got 35 cars off the street and planting strips. Word spread to the next Tow Day target blocks, where all but three or four vehicles made it into compliance with the law.

Now we hear that Auburn City Councilwoman Virginia Haugen loves the idea. She intends to share our column on it with other council members. She’d like Auburn to replicate the program, which, as Tacoma officers point out, involves no new laws, just enforcement of existing ones.

We’ve heard, as well, from residents in Puyallup and unincorporated Pierce County who have problems with abandoned vehicles and scofflaw parkers. In Puyallup, Laurie Lowery in code enforcement is the person to call for help at (253) 770-3327. In unincorporated parts of the county, contact Pierce County Responds, (253) 798-4636, about junk vehicles.