My hometown had one of these people for a very long time, like for about 20 years. She was disruptive sometimes, and always there at city council meetings. Sometimes she raved and raved. Other times, she had salient, cogent points and drove community development. When she died, the whole town missed her and had a memorial.
Have you been to many local government meetings, Rob? People like this hijack the right to petition their government for a redress of grievances, and discourage others from participating, which in turn allows local governments to get away with all sorts of shit. If spending thousands of dollars would guarantee that the ranters stayed away from city council meetings, Iād start a Kickstarter.
I could understand some kind of watered-down misdemeanor for refusing to stop disrupting the meeting and another misdemeanor for āno, I donāt want to goā and pulling your arm away. That way ranters and cranky grannies would not end up being felons.
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I was a crime and government reporter for about 5 years. I know more about local meeting cranks and their bullshit than most!
The point: local governments know how to deal with troublesome speakers and public meetings are the proper venue for them to be dealt with. Every quorum, from the tiniest solid waste authority to twenty-councilor city meetings, is in the business of dealing with obstruction and disruption, and competent ones do so very wellāwithout charging people with felonies. The entire professional caste of city management types exists to codify the rules and procedures that take care of how government interacts with the public.
Public arrest and felony prosecution makes sense only if you imagine these meetings as merely a check-and-balance, a moment of sunshine allowing public observance of the workings of duly-elected authority. But theyāre supposed to be much more than thatātheyāre supposed to be about the public participation. We should not be so enthusiastic about tacked-on, time-limited Q&A at public meetings that more often than not will spend hours in closed session. Almost all of them are paid to be there. Make them sit there a while and earn it.
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The charges are certainly problematic. Even a misdemeanor seems excessive. The police played their part of escalating the conflict and escalating the charges, but you have to question how innocent the town council was of the police actions.
But I do have to point out that at all sorts of political gatherings, thereās a serious political problem of trying to make sure a few people donāt monopolize the limited time available for discussion; the common solution is to insist on a limit to speaking time, and thereās often some person present who will deliberately talk over the limit and rant about the infringement on their free speech rights (ignoring the free speech rights of the ten people still waiting to speak).
Well, he did mention the Taliban, which means he is insane and therefore deserves to be manhandled, jailed and charged with a felony. He should be thankful they didnāt rape him but I wouldnāt advice he take up jogging in public any time soon.
Free speech does not give you the right to shout fire in a crowded theater, go a few minutes over the time limit, or mention the Taliban at public meetings. Any resemblance between government authorities in the US and the Taliban is strictly coincidental and should not be seen as evidence the āranterā may well be right.
Thank youāthat puts it into context very well.
Sir, you are creating a public a nuisance. Move along now or you will be arrested. If you want to exercise your freedom of speech, go to a town meeting.
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Donāt read into my comment that I think you smarmily authoritarianistic. I do not.
You seem to have appraised the situation without any obvious bias.
But perhaps the suggestion that the issue be dealt with outside the confines of the meeting and not by police is not so unusual.
Police, by the way, who may have been planted for the very purpose of synthesising a felony charge. Souring, I would think, any just-world sweetener one can throw on the situation.
The Tallahassee City Commission has just installed a microphone kill switch so that they can cut off anyone who exceeds their 3 minute time, or expresses themselves with personal attacks. This action was provoked by an ongoing thorn in their side who has caused much legal discomfort for the Mayor and a couple of the other commissioners.
Here is a link to the editorial written by the Editor of the Tallahassee Democrat, who is opposed to the cutting off of debate. The issue will no doubt end up in court.
http://blogs.tallahassee.com/our-voices-getting-lost-in-this-city-hall-mess/
The one flaw in your assessment is that there are so often a handful of people at these meetings that bring their personally directed utter bullshit attacks and start mouthing off at the council members. I was on the receiving end one too many times. It made the job HELL. I was there trying to cut through the weeds, get reasonable input and try to make sense of sticky issues that had to be dealt with on a shoestring budget, and I was a volunteer.
While I feel people should be able to blow off steam at meetings, and even cuss and swear and carry on publicly, I solidly DO NOT believe in personal attacks, because to be on the receiving end of them is awful. There HAS to be some mechanism whereby everyone can get a voice, but the moment it turns into personal attacks and veers from the issues, itās over.
But whereās the bright line? Nowhere. Itās a murky issue. There is no black-and-white here on this.
Making your job hell is not a felony. 
Death to rude interruptors!
Nah, I was responding to Rob with the āsmarmy authoritarianismā comment (sorry if that seemed misdirected).
Iāll agree that the whole situation seems ripe with the government types playing the āItās OUR meeting and how dare you disrupt it!ā game (when itās really the peoplesā meeting), and having police planted there was only going to predictably escalate the situation.
That being said, Iām not so sure that the issue can be handled legally outside of the meeting in such an easy fashion. If this guy is committed to being an obstructionist, thereās no way heās going to be reasonable about it. One has to wonder how many prior warnings and disruptions that he had to cause before it escalated to this point. It would be very helpful to have that info. That would make it so much easier to figure out if this is a āpower mad local govt.ā type situation vs. āfrustrated local govt. that finally had to bring in the police to get local nutjob out of their hairā.
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