2 Thrown Out Of Heated Meeting On Health Care Reform (Cleveland OH)

WEWS.com ^ | Aug 13, 2009

[grey_whiskers]

I've been waiting for someone to bring this up.

And wondering when the Republicans in Congress were going to use it in response to (say) the lies about Robert Bork or Clarence Thomas or Sarah Palin...

Cheers!

[dalebert]

its not just healthcare...its all of it.

[offduty]

In Ohio, university police officer undergo the same trainning and certification as municipal officers. They have the same police powers as any other leo. Their “jurisdiction” for misdemeanors is confined to areas that are owned by the university just as city cops misdemeanor powers end at the city limits. They do have arrest authority for felonies anywhere in the state, again, just like a city officer.

I imagine since this was happening on University property their position was to keep disruptions to a minimum to “keep the peace.” Sometimes there is a very fine line between freedom of speech and disorderly conduct. If you look at the Ohio statute the key words are “inconvenience, annoyance or alarm” in a public place. Since there appeared to be a Q&A as part of the program, the protesters were probably escorted out of the meeting under the D/C disturbance portion of the statute.

I know I’m going to take some hits on this by those who will argue the first amendment issue and I respect their position, but by dirupting the meeting, the rights of those who were there to listen to her BS were also infringed. A classic case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Hope this helps you understand.

[nathanbedford]

Thank you for your post to the information it contains. You'll get no heat from me, I find your post and your points entirely reasonable. It is good to know that the policemen are thoroughly trained. I agree with you that the ejections were probably under a disorderly persons ordinance or statute.

I do have reservations about a disorderly persons law that can be used to shut down speech, especially political speech, under a test that the speech constitutes disorderly conduct if it causes "inconvenience, annoyance or alarm." I do not much like the idea of being required to modify my speech or my behavior to suit the subjective and highly irrational threshold of annoyance for someone like, for example, Sheila Jackson-Lee or Maxine Walters.

I am surprised that the statute has withstood constitutional test. I would reject it on two grounds: First, is unconstitutional because it is too vague. Second, it is unconstitutional because it is too subjective, it falls into the trap of fixing my constitutional rights on your threshold of tolerance. I suppose it could be dressed up by saying that it must cause inconvenience, annoyance or alarm to a reasonable person under the circumstances rather than to the actual parties involved. I just do not like free speech to be dependent on the acting ability of the one objects to it.

I quite agree that the cops are put in a very difficult position in these situations. Whether they behave reasonably I think depends to a large degree on whom they think has a right to set the standard. Is it a reasonable standard applicable to all situations or is it a movable standard depending (and dependent ) the parties involved?

[Jabba the Nutt]

Fudge responded, "Well, I don't know how many people who are not Americans that are in that number. I don't know that answer."

BS. Answer the question: Is the plan going to cover non-American citizens, including those here illegally?

Of course, her side-stepping non-answer is an answer: Yes, she wants illegals covered.

[Jabba the Nutt]

I'd like to have started a chant at this meeting: Listen to us! Listen to us!

You get 364 days a year to talk, you can listen for one day. How'd she vote on Kneecap and Tax?

[boxerblues]

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes.xpd?year=2009&person=412327

She voted with a big ole YEA

[sport]

The slaves are not allowed to question their masters.

[sport]

The civil war continues.

We are civil and they are warring.

[rintense]

Anyone else wanna bet the two men were plants, told when to speak up, and used to ‘set an example’?

[DejaJude]

Ah, Fudge!

[Badeye]

We’re winning this battle!

[chrisser]

FWIW, CWRU is a private university (my AM, BTW).

It is located in “University Circle” which is a cultural area stuffed with hospitals, museums, and CWRU, along with Severance Hall (Cleveland Orchestra), Cleveland Clinc, restaurants, etc. Worked well many decades ago, but now all the institutions are competing for space and the surrounding neighborhoods (except “Little Italy”) turned to ghetto. You have Cleveland Police, although they’re generally busy with keeping the “neighbors” out of the circle, and also “University Circle” has it’s own police force. Then the University has its own. I suspect the various institutions all have their own police to one degree or another.

It’s somewhat of an interesting or odd (depending on your perspective) place to learn. CWRU was formed by the merger of Western Reserve University (liberal arts college) and Case Insitute of Technology (engineering, etc.). Allied are CIA and CIM (Cleveland Insitutes of Art and Music, respectively), plus the graduate schools and medical schools. There’s a huge legion of geeks, and another huge legion of trust fund liberals mixed in with musicians, artists, doctors, historians, etc.

When I was there for my undergrad work (late 80s), most people didn’t have the time for politics (the place wasn’t cheap then, and is even worse now). You definitely don’t coast through an engineering degree, and especially not there. Only those who were there on Mommy and Daddy’s dime majoring in poetry or the like had the luxury of time to be politically active. That may have changed in the last few decades.

Just a little background from my (perhaps slightly outdated) perspective...

I still live in Cleveland, but don’t get over to that side of town much anymore.

[agrace]

I’ve seen that video in recent days. Scary stuff. This is ACORN, folks. I admire the girl behind the camera - gets her points across forcefully but intimidates no one, and is not intimidated.

I especially shake my head over the woman who declares that refusal to do what a police officer says (in this case, two consenting human beings were ordered not to converse together) is “resisting.”

Resisting WHAT?

[agrace]

In other parts of the state on Wednesday, U.S. Rep. Steve LaTourette and U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown also held public meetings.

Grr, there's nothing about it on LaTourette's website! Nor about any upcoming meetings.

LaTourette's public meeting was at a senior center in Eastlake. He made no secret of his distaste for the health-care proposals Congress was mulling.

Well that's a little comfort I guess. Unless he was pandering.

[TexasRepublic]

Those communist politicians need a thrashing just like that.

[offduty]

I probably should have expanded my reply to include more of the pertinent language in the statute. In Ohio, there are two sections to the Disorder Conduct statute. One section deals with D/C Intoxication which basically says if a person is willfully drunk and causes a disturbance or is to a point where he is unable to care for himself, he can be charged. The other section is D/C Disturbance. This section deals with the wording inconvenience, annoyance or alarm in a public place. When I was still a LEO in Ohio the charge was a minor misdemeanor and a subject could be arrested. The Supreme Court of Ohio struck down the portion of the law that allowed arrest since the penalty for a minor misdemeanor carries no provisions for incarceration. The way the law now reads is that a person charged with D/C Disturbance is given a summons to appear (like a traffic ticket.) I would guess (and I don't like to second-guess the officers thoughts) the officers felt the action/reaction of the comments were becoming incendiary and thought by removing the people from the venue it would defuse a tough situation. Remember how quickly the SEIU and Acorn groups are to resort to violence. I wasn't there, I don't know what the dynamic was, but having spent 20 years as a police officer the first rule of thumb in deescalating a situation is to get the people that are causing the problem out of there. I doubt there was any thought given to the content of what was said, it was a reaction to a situation that could have quickly gotten out of hand. I spend many a time dealing with protesters during my career and it didn't matter to me which side of the fence they were on. A crowd can get very ugly, very quickly. Again, from my experience, every time I had to deal with a “mob” it was started by someone who verbally agitated the crowd and then melted away after the crowd had reached its boiling point. And, lastly, there is a feeling of anonymity in a crowd. People will do things in a crowd that they would never do alone. Just my thoughts.

[nathanbedford]

An armchair political scientist like me would probably prefer a system which maximizes speech right up to the point of disruption which is to say, criminality. That's great from ivory tower perspective but it must be a nightmare for a policeman on duty.

A cop on the spot has literally only seconds to decide whether or not to eject someone; the lawyers and judges have months and years to second-guess.

What do you think of my idea of publishing the rules before the affair? This clearly would work better in an indoor venue than a sprawling outdoor affair. I tend to believe that most people will adhere to rules which they believe are not ad hoc and which appear to be applied uniformly to both sides. In other words, if it were announced that there would be no comments tolerated before the question-and-answer session, that might be observed without much police encouragement. If the police have to enforce it, at least it has the look of regularity about it.

I have no doubt that you and most policeman enforce order in these affairs not according to the contents of the speech but according to your judgment of the volatility of the situation and the threat created by the heckler. I have a problem with that though, why should a minority voice that offends the majority, even to the extent of running the risk of a violent reaction by the majority, be squelched by the police because the majority is on the verge of committing the crime of assault? I know what the practical answer is, there aren't enough cops to control the majority that they can control a single heckler.

Even more difficult for me is a situation in which a heckler is suppressed by the police not because the crowd is on the verge of violence but merely because a segment of the crowd is offended by the content of the heckler's speech.

From the policeman's point of view, he is there to preserve the peace as the first order of business and not to act out hypothetical constitutional free-speech scenarios.

We often hear that the people in the audience have the right to hear the speaker but can it not be said that a heckler in the audience has an equal right to make his voice heard over the speaker? The audience will say they came to hear the speaker, but the heckler can say they came to be heard. I know which one the cops will favor and usually they will be right to favor the speaker over the heckler but that assumes that the speaker has some paramount right to be heard. This takes me back to the original questions about who was sponsoring the affair and who has established the rules originally?

With all these imponderables it is small wonder the policeman's lot is not a happy one.

[offduty]

Your comments are thought provoking and in the abstract are difficult (as a cop) to answer. Let me try and put this in some perspective by using an actual situation.

Did you see the older gentleman confront Arlen Specter at his town hall meeting? The video is up on youtube and the guy was on Fox complaining that he had called Specter’s office and was assured of the opportunity to speak for 5 minutes.

If you look at the video, as he was yelling at Specter, there was another younger, bigger man behind him that grabbed the guy and forcibly tried to move him out of the way. This was an incendiary moment. Here you had a man who was arguing with the Senator but presented a minimal threat other than his loud voice, the younger guy, though felt the need to intervent with force and grabbed the older guy. As he was moving the older guy, you can hear Specter raise his voice (yelling “Wait a minute...wait a minute..”) and in the background see plain clothes security personnel moving towards the confrontation.

Point is, it would take very little for something like this to explode out of control. In regards to the Cleveland incident, it is my understanding that there was an announcement prior to the start of the meeting that no outburst would be tolerated and that a Q&A session would be held at some point in the meeting.

While I share your thoughts on First Ammendment issues and I cherish the right of free speech there is a point when one man’s free speech tramples another’s right to hear. Look at it this way, if you and your family went to a public place, say a restaurant and the guy at the table next to you was making loud, salacious comments about your wife and daughter, would you still maintain the argument that he has a “right” to free speech or would you ask the restaurant management to take action?

I know this is probably an oversimplification of the issue, but again, I reserve comment only because I wasn’t there. Also, the video that is represented is only a small portion of the crowd and you really don’t know what the dynamic is outside of the lens of the camera.

And to address your first point, after the violence has erupted, there is a potential for totally innocent people to be impacted adversely when they were not a part of the original confrontation.

Thanks for making a good sound argument. I have always looked forward to trying to reconcile the philosophical with the practical. Unfortunately, once the genie is out of the bottle, it is difficult to put it back in.

Regards.

[griswold3]

“This is a wonderful, generous country and those that for whatever reason are without, we have to figure out how to get them into the umbrella,” LaTourette said.

That means ‘How are we gonna make other people pay higher taxes (prices etc) to pay for your benefits?’

Only a ‘progressive’ (D or R) would turn a virtue (charity) into a ‘right’!