On Sunday, USA Today reported that the Occupy movement sprouting up across the nation is putting America’s law enforcement officers “in a quandary”:
“[M]ore than a month after the protest movement began in Manhattan's Liberty Square, police agencies across the country are engaged in a struggle to preserve the right to public expression while maintaining the peace inside and outside the group's makeshift tent communities.”
Whether they mean to or not, media sources like USA Today propagate the image of Occupy protestor as bands of transient hippies just looking for a good time and a chance to provoke law enforcement agencies into physical confrontations. Talking heads on both sides of the political divide are constantly undercutting the movement’s efforts by painting its participants as dangerously subversive, ignorant, hateful and misguided.
As TV host Bill O’Reilly wrote for Fox News on Friday, “The ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement is not – is not – a spontaneous protest against economic inequality. It is a well thought-out campaign to bring down the infrastructure of this country to turn us into a western European type entitlement state” (his emphasis).
And O’Reilly’s condemnation of the movement is not altogether out of sync with what some law enforcement agencies are saying. After Denver police raided an Occupy “encampment” on Saturday, a spokesman for the police department told the Associated Press, “There's a group of very committed people who believe in a cause, and then there are a few people who just want to cause trouble.” No doubt it’s the same sentiment felt by the Oakland police officers who fractured the skull of a Marine veteran of the Iraq War, 24-year-old Scott Olsen, last Tuesday.
Regardless of political affiliations, most Americans agree that the Occupy protests are affecting the day-to-day efficiency of many towns and cities. There are traffic concerns and issues regarding medical access and public health. Yet throughout it all, we mustn’t forget the people’s right to peaceably assemble. It is one mankind’s most precious and fundamental freedoms, guaranteed by both the Constitution of the United States and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is a right no true democracy can do without.
Chief Justice Morrison Waite, regarding the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Cruikshank (1875), perfectly outlined the right to assemble when he wrote:
“The right of the people peaceably to assemble for lawful purposes existed long before the adoption of the Constitution of the United States. In fact, it is, and always has been, one of the attributes of citizenship under a free government. It 'derives its source,' to use the language of Chief Justice Marshall … 'from those laws whose authority is acknowledged by civilized man throughout the world.' It is found wherever civilization exists.”
The protests may be a major inconvenience for many Americans, but that’s actually the aim of any protests: to bother people into recognizing some social ill that goes widely ignored. And the Occupy protesters don’t represent some fringe movement. Polls regularly show that a large portion of Americans generally support the movement’s list of grievances.
Law enforcement agencies nationwide must remember their role work for the people of the United States, not when and how it’s most convenient for police officers to do so, but in a manner that best suits the public they’re meant to serve.