It has been more than 18 months and UC Berkeley police are still puzzling over what to do about non-students with street names like “Skunk Boy,” “Cricket,” and “Dumpster Muffin” who have been living in the oak trees near Cal’s Memorial Stadium where the university plans to build a $140 million sports center. The tree squatters are protesting the development, not only by occupying the trees, but also by verbally haranguing passersby and, occasionally, by dumping buckets of human waste on them.

Last week, UC Police Chief Victoria Harrison went up in a cherry picker to beseech the tree sitters to come down peaceably. The university directed arborists to remove wooden platforms, tarps, traverse lines, victuals and the waste buckets. One of the Tree Hippies, a 19-year-old, female non-student, is alleged to have bitten one of the arborists.

Berkeley is less than a two-hour drive from Sacramento. But it might as well be on the other side of the world considering the university’s bizarre tolerance for the tree trespassers and their antics. We think it is time that the UC police, who are funded with our tax dollars, start acting like a grown-up law enforcement agency, not like devotees of Mahatma Gandhi.

A university spokesman announced last week that, “If people [the Tree Hippies] are going to put up a fight, we are going to let them stay.”

Huh? Tree sitters who compound their trespassing with attacks on law enforcement officers will be allowed to remain aloft on the limbs? The university would prefer to make these recalcitrant “protesters” come down voluntarily by denying them access to food.

Can you imagine anyplace else on the planet where trespassers would be permitted to sit in trees for a year and a half, sometimes dropping urine and excreta bombs on persons coming too close?

Apparently it is considered bad form and inhumane in “Berzerkeley” for law enforcement to forcibly extract such trespassers. But it is not disturbing in the slightest there to have arborists chomped upon and bystanders showered with offal.

Memo to UC Berkeley: Flush these annoying human tree lemurs out now, by any appropriate non-lethal means.

No, we are not suggesting playing the national anthem in the tree sitters’ presence at high volume day and night on an endless loop (though we have to admit the idea is appealing).

Pepper spray will do just fine.