Forum Post: Was Zucotti Park Unsafe?

On the 15th of November people were told to leave Zuccotti Park for cleaning. On November 16th the police destroyed people’s belongings and forced them to stop sleeping in the park. The occupy wall street movement had been removed from Zuccoti park because they had created public health and safety issues and made the park unusable to the general public. This seems like good reasoning, and in a lot of ways it is. There were public safety and health issues, and the park wasn’t really accessible unless you were protesting. But does the eviction violate first amendment rights? The first amendment states “congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech… or the right of people to peaceably assemble… to redress the government for a redress of grievances.” But these rights are subject to “reasonable place and time restrictions” which means that if you’re in the way of the general public the right can be overturned. The reason that this question is so interesting is that both sides of the issue have very good points. An occupy Wall Street protestor will say that the complaints about public safety were just pretext. Where as someone on the other side of the issue might say that the entire movement was “just a spontaneous and promiscuous occurrence of rapes, murders, arrests, prostitution, and drugs, mired in feces and urine” as Jim Byrd, a writer for The Canada Free Press said in his article Occupy Wall Street and the First Amendment. The way that the Supreme Court would decide if this situation was a violation of rights is through looking at precedents. A precedent is when the judges look at what a ruling was on a past case of similar nature and then base their decision on the past ruling. One example where the court did rule in favor of a first amendment was in 1939, when C.I.O (Committee For Industrial Organization) was holding a meeting to plan their recruitment drive and Frank Hague ordered police to stop them from holding the meeting by taking their supplies and ordering them to leave. C.I.O sued, saying that their first amendment rights had been violated. Justice Owen J. Roberts ruled that their first amendment rights had been violated and that the right to assemble is “a privilege inherent in citizenship of the United States.” In a similar case, Cox v. New Hampshire (1941), a group of Jehovah’s witnesses was convicted for marching down Main Street in Manchester with signs. New Hampshire said that they were violating a New Hampshire statute that required a license for parades and processions. The Jehovah’s witnesses said that this infringed on their first amendment rights. In the end the court ruled that it did not because they were blocking public space from its intended use. This is similar to Occupy Wall Street because it means that by stopping the park from being usable by the general public the first amendment rights may not apply. Sleeping can be speech, and in the case of Occupy Wall Street it was their speech. It was probably the best form of speech that they could have chosen. By saying that you can’t sleep at the park for public safety but that you can be there for 24 hours a day seems like a pretext to kick a movement out of a city that gets a lot of its revenue from the very thing that the movement is protesting against. The Mayor of New York can not legally stop a protest or a speaker from continuing based on what the content of his or her protest or speech is. And that is exactly what happened in the case of Occupy Wall Street. Therefore the eviction did not comply with first amendment rights.