
{"id":14136,"date":"2010-11-24T09:30:34","date_gmt":"2010-11-24T14:30:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=14136"},"modified":"2010-11-24T10:07:48","modified_gmt":"2010-11-24T15:07:48","slug":"letter-why-are-the-police-stifling-first-amendment-rights-in-carrboro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2010\/11\/24\/letter-why-are-the-police-stifling-first-amendment-rights-in-carrboro\/","title":{"rendered":"Letter: Why are the police stifling First Amendment rights in Carrboro?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On Nov. 15, around 4 p.m., local Earth First! Activists gathered outside of the Royal Bank of Canada in Carrboro to protest the bank\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s investment in the world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most destructive project, the Canadian Tar Sands. We were holding signs, banners and doing some chanting. The police arrived and told us that we could not stand anywhere on the sidewalk at all. They also told us, very directly, and repeatedly, to leave.<\/p>\n<p>After asking them about four times to clarify if we would be arrested if we didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t leave, they admitted that they just thought that we should leave \u00e2\u20ac\u0153for our own safety.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d We decided to stay. They then said that we had to stop chanting, and that it was breaking the noise ordinance. I told them I thought that it was our First Amendment right to protest and that noise ordinances usually applied to other types of noises and usually in the evening after a certain time, not outside businesses in the middle of the day; but they insisted that if we continued to chant, we would go to jail. Since we could no longer make any noise, it seemed almost pointless to be there and so we ended our protest early. <\/p>\n<p>I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been to a lot of demonstrations around the country, and it seems like it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s usually small towns where the police don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand the right to peaceably assemble and believe their town is, somehow, the exception to the Constitution. We are planning more demonstrations, but we are afraid we could be arrested for merely making noise and chanting. We held this same protest in Chapel Hill, and the police did not force us to be quiet under threat of arrest. This whole situation is frustratingly ironic, because Carrboro considers itself a progressive town; but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been harassed less in conservative cities like Charlotte. If this is what people consider a free and democratic society, then this is very sad. We expected more from Carrboro. <\/p>\n<p>The noise ordinances for Carrboro is <a href=\"http:\/\/ci.carrboro.nc.us\/TC\/PDFs\/TownCode\/TownCodeCh05.pdf\">ci.carrboro.nc.us\/TC\/PDFs\/TownCode\/TownCodeCh05.pdf<br \/>\n<\/a><br \/>\nMichelle Viera<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On Nov. 15, around 4 p.m., local Earth First! Activists gathered outside of the Royal Bank of Canada in Carrboro to protest the bank\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s investment in the world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most destructive project, the Canadian Tar Sands.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14136"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14243,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14136\/revisions\/14243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}