Sorry, protesters: Oakland is right to impose new rules

Oakland city officials who are restricting street marches and imposing security measures at public meetings are taking actions that are way past due. Yet opponents who want to wrest control of the city from legitimate, elected officials claim that limiting night marches to sidewalks violates their right to free speech.

Let them say so.

No smart judge would rule in favor of mayhem in the streets, danger in public buildings, and do-nothing governance. In fact, disruptive, chaotic meetings and street violence actually discourage free speech by intimidating other people from taking part in civic life.

What began one week ago with heightened security measures inside Oakland City Hall, including hiring more security guards, has been broadened to include reasonable restrictions on marching in the street.

Inside City Hall, balcony seating has been closed to make it easier to clear the council chambers in the event of trouble, city officials said. Since May 19, people entering the building have had their bags searched, which is standard procedure in courthouses and federal facilities.

But when city officials take any action to promote civil behavior in public spaces, somehow it’s considered a repressive government act.

In post 9/11 America, few people enter a government building in a major city without emptying their pockets and passing through a metal detector. In Oakland, federal officials permanently closed the public walkway that connects the twin high-rise structures that make up the Ron Dellums Federal Building years ago. So any claims that Oakland’s in-house rules are draconian just won’t fly.

The one mistake in overreaching their authority that city officials made last week was to try to require people attending public meetings to identify themselves. That was a violation of the state’s open-meetings law for localities, called the Brown Act. Security guards halted the sign-ins when the violation was pointed out.

Reasonable rules

But the new approach requiring night-time protesters to stay on sidewalks is completely reasonable because street protests have too often devolved into post-march madness.

Yet hundreds of people are defying the city’s new effort to keep the peace. The city enforced the order last week by herding hundreds of protesters onto the sidewalk from streets on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday nights. I watched New York City police officers do the the same thing on CNN less than a month ago.

Reining in demonstrations in a city that has a well-established history of violence after dark is a reasonable time, place and manner restriction on free-speech rights. And anyone who’s seen the fallout from Oakland protests run amok— like every merchant whose glass storefront was smashed in this month — cannot deny the logic.

But that hasn’t stopped activists from questioning the validity of the city policy. On three nights last week, protesters challenged the city order — and police used tear-gas appropriately on Saturday night to achieve crowd compliance.

Oakland should welcome any legal challenge; there is a mountain of historical evidence to support its approach. Not even the most righteous protester can deny that street demonstrations in Oakland precipitate violence and mayhem.

However, legal scholars warn that any restriction on civil liberties can take some hard work to defend.

“Demonstrators’ claims are as important and as American as apple pie,” said Professor Frank Zimring, a UC Berkeley criminal law professor and author. “What you have is a head-on collision of important values and people trying to find the the best way to negotiate a way out of it, but there is no win-win scenario.”

“Government restrictions have got to be reasonable,” added Professor Jesse Choper, a UC Berkeley law professor and constitutional law expert. “They can restrict what (protesters) are carrying, whether it’s a garbage-can lid or weapons of mass destruction,” Choper said.

“You can’t hold a peaceful antiwar march on the Bay Bridge in the middle of the afternoon, so I think the burden of proof will be on the city to show these are reasonable restrictions.”

Pattern of violence

With protesters’ history of destruction, violence and vandalism — from the Oscar Grant and Occupy protests to the Black Lives Matter-inspired marches held since last fall — Oakland should have no problem showing why night-time marches in the street should be nixed.

As for the new security measures at City Hall, Claudia Cappio, the assistant city administrator who approved them, said the actions were taken to preserve the democratic process, not destroy it.

“You have to strike a balance between accessibility and the business of government. And with the rules we’ve put in place, the business of government and people’s ability to access are considered common ground,” Cappio said. “I have the responsibility of making sure people are safe.”

Chip Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. His column runs on Tuesday and Friday. E-mail: chjohnson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @chjohnson