After September’s anti-globalization protests here in D.C., I wrote with no small measure of disgust that the police appeared to have arrested thousands of protesters under false pretenses. Marchers were charged with “failure to obey a police order” to disperse, cuffed, and carted off to be detained, where many paid fines to secure their release hours later. This despite the fact that, as far as I could tell on the basis of reports from the scene, no such order was ever issued, and people were actually prevented from dispersing if they tried. The D.C. police’s own internal report now confirms this.
The Post cites Chief Charles H. Ramsey as claiming that the “issue was irrelevant, because the protesters had no permit and ignored police orders to clear the streets earlier in the day.” Let’s take the second part first. A distinct set of protesters had ignored orders to get out of the street and stop blocking traffic. Their arrest, I’ll freely grant, was perfectly appropriate. The right to assemble is not the right to deprive others of the use of public roads whenever you feel like it. I fail to see, though, how the crimes of one set of people justify the arrest of a totally distinct set of people: does this mean that a few vandals (or agents provocateur) are all that’s needed to shut down a mass demonstration? Even if the vandalism is separated by both time and space from the part of the demonstration that’s broken up?
Then there’s the business about marching without a permit. True though that may be, it hardly makes the fabrication of the order to disperse “irrelevant.” Protesting without a permit is a misdemeanor, for which one can be fined and ticketed, but not arrested. Failure to obey a police order is an arrestable offense, which is why that order needed to be invented. If the bit about the order to disperse were really “irrelevant,” why concoct one in the first place?
As I noted back in September, conservative ire on this point wasn’t exactly shaking the rafters. But it should be: this is precisely the kind of disdain for the rule of law that led so many on the right to condemn the Clinton regime. Does the principle become less important when the victims of its breach are scruffy leftists? Ramsey & co. deserve to catch serious flak for this, and if they want to be consistent, conservatives should be leading the charge.
Update: Zoe is peeved as well, and provides a link to share your own peevishness with your local D.C. council member.
