The university’s response was likely the quickest show of police force in response to a divestment protest among the dozens nationwide that have occurred in recent weeks. It was also probably the only one where pepper balls, stun guns and rubber bullets were used against students, faculty and community members – at one of the few student protests in the south to date.
The university is not publicly owned, they can have people removed under various laws like trespassing or disturbing the peace. They aren’t exactly being removed and arrested because of what they are saying, but because they are rightfully upsetting the university by being there and being a nuisance.
If I am at your house protesting you eating meat and I set up my camp on your front lawn, you can have the police remove me by force after I have been asked to leave and my rights would not be violated in that removal. Same sort of thing is going on with the university protests.
If they were protesting in a public park and had all the permits they needed(permitted protest is a funny concept) and violated zero laws(while protesting lol), then the police came and ordered them to disperse, they didn’t, then the police began using riot control tactics and arresting people, that would violate first amendment law.
True about Emory. Not true about places like Ohio State and Indiana University, where there have been violent police reprisals and many arrests.
For public entities, the protest can be considered unlawful and not violating rights by the bad actions of individuals which then causes police intervention, which then riles the crowd, and then it snowballs from there. Once the crowd is considered riotous, the whole thing becomes unlawful assembly. We saw this in Portland and Seattle years ago.
All it takes is one person committing assault or battery on another person and then the cops have writ to act as they see fit, this includes throwing a waterbottle at a cop that is full or empty or shoving someone. There is no real chance that any level of lawful police action will maintain the peace when you have groups of energized unhappy people. Just having police there agitates the crowd, not having police there allows bad actors to undermine the protest/peace and that leads to the police showing up.
If everybody protesting stood 6 ft apart holding signs in silence and did not react to agitators, they could keep protesting so long as no other laws prohibited it(like curfew). Unfortunately there are always idiots in any group and someone is going to overstep the line and cause the whole thing to devolve into chaos fuled by lawful police action.
SCOTUS has specifically rejected that argument. As at that point all you’d need is one infiltrator to shut down any protest.
I don’t eat meat.
It also applies to eating eggplant.
I’m a vegan so I don’t eat eggs either.
That’s a shame, because it doesn’t apply ti actual eggs.