UH police on lookout for restroom shutterbug

Cell phones can be annoying, sure: when someone takes a call in a movie, for example, or during a funeral. And that's just the voice part — something that tends to get overlooked is how some asshats can now take pictures of anything they want to using their camera phones. It's happening at the University of Houston, where some women are claiming they were photographed in campus restrooms.

The first incident happened just after 3 p.m. July 23, when someone attempted to take a photo of a woman over the top of a stall in a restroom at the Anderson Library. A week later, at 3:38 p.m. July 31, a woman was in a stall on the second floor of Agnes Arnold Hall, a classroom building, when someone stuck a black Motorola RAZR phone over the top of the stall and tried to take a picture. According to the Chronicle, the woman screamed and the suspect fled the scene. Neither woman seems to have gotten a look at the would-be photographer(s), but UH spokesman Eric Gerber said the same person is suspected in both incidents. Police are looking at surveillance tapes to see if they can spot anything suspicious: "We have reviewed our videotape to see if we have seen someone leaving the library or leaving Agnes Arnold auditorium in a hurry to see if we can get some kind of lead on that," UH Police Capt. Brad Wigtil told KTRK.

Gerber said this is the first time an incident like this has been reported on campus. We're not surprised: We just can't imagine why anybody would want to take a picture of someone in the restroom, and it looks like some of the commenters over at the Chronicle's website can't, either. "I don't understand why watching a woman on the crapper is a turn on. In fact, it's a huge turn off to me," one of them wrote. "I once accidently walked in on a beautiful woman dropping a load and I couldn't look at her straight in the eye after that." If that's not a deterrent, we don't know what is.