[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.