I was just watching the movie Let It Be. The movie ends with the Beatles going up on the roof of their studio building in London and performing an unannounced concert. A crowd starts gathering in the street as they play. The police show up and the implication is the police asked them to stop playing.
My question is whether the Beatles were doing anything specifically illegal. They weren’t personally disrupting traffic - they were playing on the roof of their own building. It was in the middle of the afternoon in London so I don’t think you could argue they were creating a noise nuisance above and beyond the normal city noise.
The police did break it up because it was causing a public disturbance. I’m confident no one was charged with anything, but the police did in fact break it up.
You know, once upon a time, before lawyers had to cite every reason for everything, police did in fact have authority to enact, or request, that public obedience be observed. The Beatles were decent blokes, and when the cops asked them to stop, they stopped. They maybe were in violation of a noise or public disturbance bylaw, but who’s going to publicly charge The Beatles?
But how might such a principle apply in other situations. You may have seen the commercials that show people lined up outside Apple stores waiting for a new product. Could the police go into the store and tell them they had to stop selling their product because it was causing lines to form on the sidewalk outside?
I realize you’re joking but this is the point of my question. Being a dirty hippy isn’t a chargeable offense - it’s just a reason why a police officer might look for an offense to charge you with. So he has to come up with a real offense that’s in the penal code like loitering or vagrancy. You can’t actually charge somebody with mopery.
25 years ago the exact same thing happened to U2 when they shot the video for Where the Streets Have No Name on top of a building in LA. The Beatles were reasonable individuals and as such knew that them doing anything anywhere near the public will inevitably cause a commotion.
Well now-a-days you can’t because there will be consequences. Back then, we’re talking '69 or '70, the man was still uptight. You could get pulled in for being a dirty hippy, and then they’d release you and tell you to get out of town and don’t come back if they had nothing to charge you with. And your chances of winning a false arrest suit were slim to none, and slim just left town. I don’t know how things were in the UK then, but apparently they weren’t much different. I remember the topic was being discussed at the time, and when I saw the movie in '70 the pigs* got booed in the theater.
That wasn’t Rizzo. But it is was certainly the city and the police force he once ruled. Under his reign peoples constitutional rights were frequently violated, with no serious repercussions.
FWIW, the Beatles were actually hoping for a more cinematically dramatic attempt by the police to shut them down, and were rather disappointed when the coppers politely asked if they wouldn’t mind wrapping things up after the next song. Ringo, on particular, had been looking forward to scuffling with a copper over his drumset.
The concert took place in a part of London with stuffy banking offices and such, like New York’s Wall Street, so the Beatles knew the onlookers would tend to not be young fans, but rather old financiers in tailored suits – just right for maximum contrast with their amplified rock music.
Dunno about the UK but here, public performances that will create any disruption of traffic or draw large crowds require permits and permissions from the city generally so if need be streets can be blocked off, extra police officers can be assigned to the area to manage the crowds, accomodation for restroom facilities, everything that ANY public even requires.
