Trust is needed to keep city peaceful
What can a city do when democracy moves faster than they can manage it?
That’s a conundrum that the Memphis City Council is facing in the age of President Donald Trump; an age when rarely a day passes when he doesn’t sign an executive order or utter an outrage that pushes activists out into the streets.
Back in February, Trump pushed thousands into the streets and in front of the National Civil Rights Museum after he signed an executive order that banned immigrants from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen for 90 days – and barred Syrian refugees indefinitely.
But paperwork almost stopped that protest.
The city was poised to deny the groups that organized it a permit because they hadn’t filed for it 14 days earlier. As it turned out, the application met the city’s standards for a spontaneous protest – one that is usually sparked by a news event and one in which groups notify the city within 24 hours of their intent to protest.
Another permit – such as the one sought by activists in March to protest the Trump administration’s final permitting for the Dakota Access Pipeline – was denied because they failed to adhere to the process. They marched anyway. So this week, a council committee tried to get some clarity from Memphis Police Director Michael Rallings and Aubrey Howard, the city’s permits administrator, on the process of how permits are issued.
For the most part, they said that permitting such events had become more taxing, with requests for permits for even non-controversial events like 5K races ballooning to more than 100 per year. Add to that the numerous protests, often in response to one of Trump’s actions or utterances, and often pulled together by activists notifying each other on Facebook, and things become more complicated.
“In the last 15 to 18 months, the volume of protests here has increased dramatically,” Bruce McMullen, the city’s chief legal officer, told me.
“We anticipate that this will be the new normal, and it will be like that for the foreseeable future.”
McMullen said while he believes the current ordinance can be open to tweaking, it still gives protesters ample time to apply for a permit. He also said he hopes that protesters understand that the law is there to protect them, should counter-protesters try to incite violence.
I can see where McMullen is coming from. Even if the protesters are peaceful, disruptors may not be – and they can try and hurt them.
However, the issue here isn’t simply one about process as much as it is one about trust and principle.
And on those last two issues, the Memphis Police Department and the city have some work to do when it comes to dealing with activists who are, for the most part, trying to make themselves heard in a system that they now see as using the cause of public safety as a cover to silence them.
The city and the police department, for example, did little to build trust by initially including activists such as Bradley Watkins of the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center, Hunter Dempster, a Greensward activist, and others who had no criminal record or violent history on a list of people required to have an escort to enter City Hall.
While their names were ultimately removed, the fact that they managed to wind up on such a list feeds into the idea that any permitting for protests can lead to police surveillance. Then there’s the principle. Being able to protest is a First Amendment right – one that some be-
lieve shouldn’t be stymied by a process that probably will never be free of arbitrariness. Also, on another level, it almost seems contradictory for people who are more fixated on justice to have to seek permission to protest from a system that is more fixated on order.
Many times, the two are not the same.
Nonetheless, the activists, the police and city officials must work together on this issue. But there must be, at the least, more attempts toward building trust among each other, and more flexibility for spontaneous protests – because under Trump, the outrages have been happening nearly spontaneously.
And resistance to it should not be restricted.