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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
A town hall for Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia outside of Atlanta on Tuesday quickly deteriorated into chaos, as police officers forcibly removed several protesters.
Ms. Greene, a Republican firebrand and loyal ally of President Trump, had barely reached the podium to speak when a man in the crowd at the Acworth Community Center stood up and started yelling, booing and jeering at her. As her supporters stood and clapped, several police officers grabbed the man, later identified by the police as REDACTED, and dragged him out of the room.
edit: redacted
Just because the property is public doesn’t mean the public can do whatever they want in it. People who are interrupting whatever is going on can definitely be removed from the proceedings.
And cops use violence with impunity, so legalities are moot there.
This is not an endorsement of what happened, just the legal justification for removing a person from an event at a public building.
Yes, but what those people were doing was exercising their first amendment rights. It’s not like they were going around punching people, or shouting “Fire!”. And considering that they were there attending a town hall, it’s really hard to make the case that they were loitering.
I don’t know that that’s true, legally speaking. I am, however, ignorant of a great many things, and this is definitely one area in which I feel a profound deficiency. But just because people routinely get abused in this way by the police doesn’t necessarily imply that it is legal for them to do so. As you point out in your next sentence, cops use violence with impunity, and our justice system tends to look the other way when they do.
It’s definitely true. For instance, you can’t just walk onto the Senate floor and protest.
You might be exercising your first amendment right to protest, and the US Capitol is a public building, but that doesn’t mean it’s illegal to throw you out.
And honestly, if this was a maga person protesting at a Democrat town hall, would anyone here jump to their defense that they were exercising their right to protest?
If someone is interrupting an event, it’s perfectly reasonable for them to be removed from that event. The removal and the police brutality are two separate conversations.
Yeah, that was more my point with my initial post. I understand escorting someone from the premises if they are causing a huge scene, but these cops violently wrestled these people out of there, even employing a potentially lethal weapon on two occasions. Many people have died over the years from being tased, and so to see it being used so wantonly is incredibly disturbing.