Teacher Arrested for Clapping in Support of Anti-Data Center Activists
futurism.com
futurism.com
Fundamentally the US has too many police forces, each of which is a law unto itself.
Fundamentally the US has too many special interest groups, each of which is a law unto itself.
Is a lone individual, or even a whole room, clapping a speech, disrupting?
What law has the individual broken by clapping or speaking? Councillors do not make law by speaking. They should get a court order if someone is being persistently disruptive, not use bully boy police intimidation.
Special interest groups do indeed have private police forces in the US, that routinely misuse the wide powers available.
Really you need to mount a better argument.
Yeah, if the presider of the meeting asks people not to do that in order to get through more comments.
> What law has the individual broken by clapping or speaking? Councillors do not make law by speaking. They should get a court order if someone is being persistently disruptive, not use bully boy police intimidation.
> Special interest groups do indeed have private police forces in the US, that routinely misuse the wide powers available.
The people who dragged him out looked like the normal town police enforcing order at a public meeting in a normal way. This is the most basic function of police - or equivalently, anyone who does this job is doing policing, regardless of whether they're a uniformed official or just the physically biggest three guys in town.
Threatening with trespass shouldn't be an option against someone exercising their rights as a citizen and resident unless directed by a court order. It simply isn't open to the police to lay hands on a citizen for something that isn't an offence.
You should really watch the video.
Constitution protects polite free speech, unambiguously.
The video footage doesn't show how disruptive he was being; but I find it reasonable that he was clapping in a way that the the person running the public comment meeting had specifically asked people not to do in the name of expediently getting to as many comments as possible.
This is the kind of situation that I think would come up in basically any human society, even some maximally-anarchist society without the institution of police. If you're having a public meeting to decide on some policy, you need someone to be in charge of the procedural rules of that meeting; if someone doesn't like something about the meeting and is doing something that arguably breaks the procedural rules, you need someone to adjudicate this and decide whether or not to compel them to leave. If someone is compelled to leave a meeting, and they resist, you need someone who will physically force them to.
You're suggesting that the bar arbitrarily set by a councilmember on what counts as sufficient disruption to hurt expediency* trumps what seems like just clapping and agreement -- one would argue is clearly protected speech per the 1st amendment and I'd argue squarely within the spirit of why we have public comments in the first place?
I think that's a pretty slippery slope and enables projecting power through process, not something we want from our elected officials.
*an aside - why is expediency the goal? if this is a contentious topic, schedule more time so the focus is on receiving public feedback!)
Lux Claridge claps only 5 claps, and is ejected as his wife is at the podium to take her turn. The linkage makes this clear violation of 1A rights.
Just about Anything can be considered "disruptive" by that definition. What is next ? Get someone arrested since they made a face or frowned at your speech ? Or sneezed or coughed ? Why even bother with an audience then ?
Uh oh someone heard something they didn’t like and someone clapped…