The right to protest should absolutely be preserved. The means of protest, however, is rightly subject to restrictions if these means are a direct danger to public heath. Restriction on gatherings to prevent COVID infection qualifies.
The in-car protests are a safe way to get around these restrictions. The protesters are still assholes, though.
A recent protest in Tel Aviv did this right:
One waggish reply has pointed out that a hexagonal grid packs more efficiently than a square one would while still maintaining 2m buffers.
Oh, darn, @Tamsin_Bailey beat me to this one. I swear I checked to see if there were earlier posts first, but missed it.
I doubt a protestor under arrest will appreciate the difference. If police are making arrests, they’re declaring the protest “non-essential” by action, regardless of justification.
If you actually believed someone’s actions were essential, you wouldn’t try to stop them.
A protester may not, but a future protest organizer may.
(like others here I think this particular protest is beyond dumb, but also think the right of protest itself is important, and protests that find a way to not group in mass, or at least remain the “we sure hope 6 feet apart makes people safe enough” distance apart)
Hmmm, on second thought these protesters sure won’t appreciate the difference. They don’t appear to put a whole lot of thought into anything.
Depending on the size of the car-based protest, and its proximity to essential services, I could see localities suing organizers for parading without a parade permit.
Recall the Michigan “car protest” actually blocked ambulance access to the area’s major trauma-center hospital.
Let’s just repurpose a local Nascar track as a first-Amendment zone/pen and let the cars go ride 500 miles in a circle over there, m’kay?
I’m still ticked off that back in 2004, then-still-a-centrist-Republican Mike Bloomberg exiled anti-RNC protests to somewhere out in Queens rather than Central Park.
The problem is that we actually need mass protesting right now. We need an insane amount of tests, and PPE (everyone who needs to work right now needs PPE, Amazon workers, FedEx Workers, grocery workers, and so on) Masks and tests need to be as ubiquitous as condoms at a gay nightclub in the early 90’s. We need to be making sure that we are not going to be facing massive food shortages in a couple of months. These are all reasons we need to be protesting right now.
That’s the genius. One person in the middle has to go to the bathroom and people shift into hex mode to let them out.
Another thing. The supporters of Don’T will not space out like that to save their own lives in the middle of a pandemic but they will at the inauguration if he wins a second term to make the “crowds” look bigger.
Just another reason to try and prevent that from happening.
It’s probably the only thing that stands even a small chance of making them think again.
While I think the reopen protesters should be fired into the sun, most of the protesting going on is stuff that deserves our support, even if it is logistically difficult at this time. There is an incredible amount of labor organizing among our sacrificial professions and there have been major demonstrations to provide shelter for the unhoused. Given the general proclivities of those in power which group do you actually think will deal with crackdowns as non-essential, the pro-disease rallies or those fighting for safety and dignity for the poor?
Yes it is. Saying otherwise is a first amendment violation of both freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, and one constantly abused. It’s mainly the latter at stake here, since the government is attempting to limit the times, places, and manner of how people assemble in order to protest. Luckily, the US already has a legal test for when and how this is allowed! We laugh at “free speech zones” for good reason, but officially the test is that restrictions on protests need to be neutral with respect to content, be narrowly drawn, serve a significant government interest, and leave open alternative channels of communication. I don’t see how restricting these protests under these circumstances fails any of those tests, but IANAL.
My main complaint here is, as so often, cops don’t know what the law is or where their authority begins and ends. There are so many better approaches! So many offense, like the reckless endangerment others have mentioned, that you can call people on if they’re not following lawful orders! Or, you know, they could actually help provide a path forward. “Here, the city is shut down anyway, we’ll close the road, use this whole big empty space, but you have to wear masks and stay six feet apart or we’ll shut you down, we’ll even put down a grid of markers for where you can stand and maintain that distance.” Grocery stores are managing it in their lines.
They only said the quiet part out loud because they felt a need to justify themselves to greater authority, i.e. people like those they arrested. This sets the stage for the later apologies if needed.
If the protesters were not white and if they weren’t seeking to force other people to their will (i.e. poorer people who provide the conveniences these people wish to indulge in), the police wouldn’t have even bothered to come up with a justification.
Remember, these protesters don’t want to resume work, they want others to resume working for them.
I am not defending the cops, just pointing out that the superior power held by this particular type of protest cosplayer is such that the police feel compelled to keep up their end in the amateur dramatics. Otherwise, just like a different “officer of the law” elsewhere pointed out, “We’ll make something up.”
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