Well, there’s the nub, right? The question isn’t whether or not a cop will overstep his authority, but whether there is, in fact, a law against what the guy was doing. The cop told him he was breaking the law, but never actually said what law was being broken. Of course, if this cop is typical, he probably only has a vague idea of many of the laws he supposed to be enforcing.
Unfortunately, like many disorderly conduct laws, the one in NY is just vague enough to allow police to exert what is, in my opinion, unreasonable restrictions on people’s use of public space.
Bullshit. It is arguable that they were within the poorly-defined scope of the overly-broad disorderly conduct law, but they had no reason to ask him to move other than a desire to unfairly privilege a private money-making organization over the rights of a citizen using public streets.
What was the guy doing? Since when does a news crew have a right to determine who stands on the sidewalk? The only people complaining about the guy were the news crew. For everyone else walking by, he was just another guy in a funny costume, posing neither a threat nor an impediment to the everyday traffic of the street.
So far, I don’t see anything cited here that gives the police the power to choose the victor when two parties are in dispute over use of a public space.
If one party harasses the other, though, the statute cited above should give the police the power to arrest/threaten to arrest the harassing party.
If Hungrr guy was intentionally interfering with the news crew’s shot, that could be considered harassment. But the statute also cites use of profanity, which the video clearly shows the news crew using.
IANAL, but I think this would be an interesting case.
We don’t know exactly what he was doing because of the way the video was edited. All we saw was the confrontation afterwards, not the incident which preceded it.
One interpretation you could have based on viewing the video would be that the news producer was the one creating the disturbance, that he got unreasonably agitated simply because the mascot was present. Another interpretation would be that the mascot disrupted their broadcast, the producer asked him not to, and the mascot refused, at which point he called the cops.
If you’ve settled on the first interpretation, then I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.
I think that the cops were alleging two things: first when they first arrived, obstructing pedestrian traffic. Second, refusing to comply with a lawful order of the police to disperse… which is when they threatened to arrest him. The cops might also have been alleging that he was loitering, based on the section of that code which talks about appearing in public with a mask, but that is unclear because most of the audio is unintelligible during their discussion.
But the question here isn’t whether the mascot was guilty of a crime, because he wasn’t arrested. The question is whether the police were within their rights to ask him to leave. They responded to a complaint from the news crew and took them at their word, asking the mascot to move along. I don’t think that there is any grounds to allege police misconduct, and I’m not sure the mascot could prevail on a civil rights claim.
Let’s all be honest here. The mascot was at this location to take advantage of the crowds gathered and to get some publicity from the resulting news coverage. It’s a common tactic and happens all the time, and usually the two can coexist. There were at least three other news crews on the scene and they didn’t seem to have a problem. Something happened with this particular news crew, something that bothered them enough to ask the mascot to stay out of their shot. And we don’t know what that was.
Even if the mascot was within his rights to be there and had done nothing wrong, he could have simply consented to the request to stay out of the shot of that one crew. He could have moved thirty yards down the block and continued to work the crowd and do his thing. That would have been an easy way to diffuse the situation.
But the Hungrr mascot acknowledges that he was interfering with the news crews shot… when the producer first approaches, he says “can you do me a favor, you know dude, we’re going live, and all we’re seeing is your big ass head on the screen.” And the mascot replies “that’s the idea.”
I’m not sure that the harassment code would apply to what the mascot was doing, but some might argue that it does. It says (240.26) “A person is guilty of harassment in the second degree when, with intent to harass, annoy or alarm another person… He or she engages in a course of conduct or repeatedly commits acts which alarm or seriously annoy such other person and which serve no
legitimate purpose.” That’s awfully broad, and I think it might be a stretch to apply it to either party in his case.