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Comment by bigyabai | Hacker News Reader

If the city council is frustrated with public comment, that's not an excuse to ignore their constituency. They can perfectly well deliberate sidewalks after respecting her allotted time.

By selectively shielding topics that the public feels strongly about, they are fomenting the conditions for more extreme petitions. This was not a private meeting, arresting her was wrong.

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Except allowing people to take up a full two minutes, or however long the allotted time is, discussing unrelated topics deprive people who want to make an on-topic comment of that opportunity.

Let's say the council eventually does schedule a public comment people to discuss Flock. Then anti-abortion activists flood the meeting, and take up all the speaking time ranting about abortion thus preventing anyone from voicing their criticisms of Flock. Is that a good outcome?

Unless there were sidewalk enthusiasts that were being denied their time, I don't see what relevance this comparison has. She was arrested for a legitimate use of her allotment.

No, she was arrested for illegitimate use of her allotment. It doesn't actually matter if there were other people concerned with the sidewalk code, a public comments period is not an opportunity to soapbox about unrelated topics.

If the city doesn't uniformly enforce these restrictions, then when the anti abortion folks try to flood the meeting and get removed they'll complain that they're being selectively targeted.

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