I am curious how protest permits work.
If a person organises a protest and doesn’t get a permit, do the protesters get arrested?
What happens if people protest spontaneously so there’s no one to get a permit?
Do the permit people have to grant permits? If you wanted to protest the protest permits people would you be out of luck?
Prior to the Republican National Convention in Saint Paul, people did have to register in advance to protest. They were told where and when they would be allowed to protest, and if they wanted to march, they were given a route to follow. Failure to follow the plan would result in arrest. The general consensus among those who registered is that it caused a brief uptick in membership, as someone from the FBI, the DHS, and the St. Paul Police Department would be joining so they could attend some meetings and see what they were really up to.
My ex-wife was a citizen journalist during the convention, so she was recording various protests and marches. One very peaceful march, which had police walking along with them to make sure they followed their route, came across a group of police in storm trooper outfits, with a bunch of embedded journalists from the major news agencies. The peaceful marching & demonstration was apparently deemed not newsworthy, so one of the storm troopers came over to tell them to go over into that park over there. The march leader pointed out that that would cause a deviation from their assigned path, and they weren’t supposed to do that. The storm trooper deemed that to be failure to comply, so they started firing tear gas.
it depends on local and state laws about permits/crowds. We had a teacher protest in NC in May with 20,000 people and they had to move to a smaller area for the last part because another group had a permit for their 1st choice spot on that date. They picked that date since it was the first day of the state politicians in session.
Without a permit the police are generally going to break up the gathering and send people on their way. Refusal to move will result in your arrest. If there a multiple people objecting to the police’s lawful order everyone could end up arrested even if they didn’t individually refuse to move.
The city pretty much needs to grant permits or risk finding themselves sued for violating peoples first amendment rights. The reason for the permit process is not to deny people the right to gather, but to ensure the people doing so are not causing danger to others or themselves. It allows the city to be aware of upcoming events and have sufficient police presence needed to control large crowds.
Permits are frequently required any time a group wants to close down a public street or road for an event. Thus quite common for parades, neighborhood festivals, farmers markets, block parties, etc. City workers will drop off appropriate barricades to block traffic at the end of the street, and even add detour signs if it’s a major street. (But they often won’t allow blocking those streets; they encourage you to relocate a block or two over.)
I live 2 blocks from Minnehaha Creek and the Parkway alongside it. I swear it is blocked for some event 2 weekends out of four during the summer,
Around here, if you’re protesting on a sidewalk or in a park, and you aren’t blocking anyone’s access, everything’s fine. If you protest in the street, you can be arrested for blocking traffic. Of course, if you step on private property, you can be arrested for trespassing.
Good old fashioned union picket lines were textbook examples of what you could and couldn’t do in a protest. These younguns out there today just don’t have the same level of training.
Of course people/unions often make a calculated decision to protest without requesting a permit. The risks are getting arrested, tear gassed or even (in extreme circumstances) shot.
Random example (France, 2016).
There were protests outside the Democratic convention in 2016 as well, and a few Sanders supporters got arrested for deviating from the route into a restricted area. Other protest ideas were floated but largely turned out to be just vapor.
These principles are often abused to harass or suppress protestors the police don’t approve of. I’ve been with protestors who were told “you can’t even hand leaflets to cars stopped at red lights because you’re endangering traffic” WHILE firemen are visible at the next intersection walking through stopped traffic collecting donations in a boot. It’s a clear double standard.
Also I’ve seen protestors on public property inside defined protest zones be told they are on private property and will be arrested. This turned out to be pure bluff, as the police did not follow up when the protestors remained. Apparently it was “worth a shot” to see if the activists could be bluffed out of their civil rights.
There are some people, both among private citizens and authority figures, who simply seem to be offended by protest, period, regardless of content. I guess any challenge to the status quo upsets them. One of the more eye-opening moments was at a march for DOGS I attended in downtown Washington, DC. The whole event was a group of families standing in a clearly-marked permitted area, ready to hear our speaker – it could not have been more orderly and innocuous. As the speaker began her first announcement, the US Capital Park Police, who had been calmly watching for over an hour, suddenly ran a “sound test” on their own equipment to drown her out.
Who doesn’t love families and dogs? It was pure harassment just because some of these people are bullies. Period.
The moral is, even if you stay inside the lines and obey all the rules, the authorities may come after you legally and even physically. Protest and activism takes courage, even in the land of the nominally free.
That depends on the situation, and the cops involved.
If it’s peaceful, and not blocking traffic and so forth, cops are less likely to do anything to stop it.
If there are counter-protesters, the cops are likely to separate them, and keep it civil. But often, less likely to shut down the protest(s) – I guess the cops see this as democracy in action.
Of course, cops have bias, too. if it’s a protest that most of the cops disagree with, they are much more likely to follow the strict legal requirements and find a reason to shut it down.
No, they don’t.
But they must have a good & valid reason for rejecting your permit request. Especially if they’ve previously given permits to other groups in the same location. The authorities have to be able to show in court that they are treating all permit requests equally.
And refusing a permit because there will be counter-protesters and it might get violent is NOT an acceptable reason to deny a permit.
The Judge will just say that the violence is not the problem of the original protesters, and the police need to prevent the counter-protesters from starting violence by arresting them. (And also arresting any protesters who respond with similar violence.)
Local laws vary. IIRC, there’s a local law here that prohibits a gathering of more than 50 people in more than one place without a permit. If 100 people want to show up in the park and start singing We Shall Overcome, the police could insist that we break up into two groups of 50 each. If we do it on private property, the property owners can insist that we leave and call the police. If we want to walk in the street and block traffic, we need a parade permit for that.
FWIW, I was in the World Naked Bike Ride just three days ago, and we did not have a permit of any kind. The only law we broke was the local anti-nudity law but a judge in Portland ruled that this law has to give way to the first amendment right to protest and the police know this. The local police knew about the bike ride in advance and they didn’t care because we didn’t block traffic and we had less than 50 people.
Please note: the rule for kitten & puppy threads does NOT apply here.
Okay, you lost me there. I have no idea what you’re saying. Which rule are you referring to?
Quick question, please. Pretend I just landed here from Mars.
Is the country you’re speaking of the one that prides itself as being “the Land of the Free”? The country that celebrates the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.? The country that admires free speech so much that it actually bumped Guns down to the #2 slot in the Bill of Rights?
You could have fooled me.
The rule requiring including a photo link. 
Greetings, Martian. I’ll be happy to explain it to you.
The founders of this country considered it very important to avoid some serious mistakes they had observed other countries doing. That’s why #1 in the Bill of Rights mentions several things that our government is not allowed to do. The government is NOT allowed to…
[ul]
[li]respect an establishment of religion[/li][li]prohibit the free exercise of religion[/li][li]abridge the freedom of speech[/li][li]abridge the freedom of the press[/li][li]abridge the right of the people to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances[/li][/ul]
For example, the government cannot tell the citizens which religion they should join. However, a parent is absolutely free to tell their child which religion they should join. The government cannot shut down a newspaper for what they print. However, the advertisers are absolutely free to withhold money from the newspaper for what they print. The government cannot punish citizens for what they say and think. However, citizens are absolutely free to punish each other for what they say and think. And the government is absolutely free to punish citizens for what they do (as long as they apply such punishments to all the citizens equally).
If Sarah Huckabee Sanders, in her official capacity as a government official, prohibited a citizen from eating in a restaurant because of what the citizen has said or thought, that would be a violation of the first amendment. But if a citizen does the same thing to Sarah, it’s not, because the first amendment only says what the government is not allowed to do; it doesn’t apply to the question about what the citizens are allowed to do.
Where it gets tricky is when citizens try to punish each other for silly things like whether a person has light skin or dark skin and then expect the government to back them up. Essentially, the government becomes an accomplice, and it’s breaking the rule about treating all the citizens equally. Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed out just how bad the system was in the middle of the 20th century. He (and others) convinced the government to take steps to correct the problems. For example, people with dark skin were constantly being told (both by citizens and by the government) that they were not allowed to eat or drink or live or go to school in certain places where only people with light skin were allowed. The government wrote new laws to try to stop this from happening. To a large degree, the new laws worked. And now, in the 21st century, if a restaurant owner tells a customer they can’t eat there because their skin is too dark, the owner can’t call the police and expect the police to forcibly remove the customer. On the contrary, we expect the police to punish the owner in that situation.
Thank you for visiting and have a safe trip back to Mars.
Martian is very confused. Thread is about “protest permits” with Sanders and/or restaurants never mentioned. Your response is about Sanders and resturants with protest permits never mentioned.
Beam me out of here, Scotty.
Oops. I posted in the wrong thread. I was looking at two different threads and got them mixed up.