During the holiday season at Judiciary Square, the lawyers are idle and most of the cops are elsewhere. But skateboarders bear down on the Henry J. Daly Building, better known as D.C. police headquarters. On Dec. 28, a group of five local high-school and college students, outfitted with baggy pants and digital video cameras, took to a marble strip directly beneath police windows to work on their manual 180s. They drew a gaggle of admiring pedestrians, one of whom looked up at the building and wondered aloud, “Why don’t [police] just come out and tell them to leave?” After about 20 minutes, a cop did just that, thereby concluding what 18-year-old Allen Danze, one of the cameramen, described as an unusually short session under the cops’ noses. “There’s usually not much hassle here,” he said. Danze added that his friends’ choice of location has nothing to do with an affront to authority: “It’s all about the architecture.” — Dave Jamieson