Minnesota’s House of Representatives voted on Monday to stiffen penalties for protesters who block traffic on highways and other roadways. The move was seen as a response to recent highway blockades in the state utilized by Black Lives movement demonstrators to protest the police shooting of unarmed African-American men.

The provision, which was part of a public safety package, would make blockading a highway a “gross misdemeanor” punishable by up to a $3,000 fine and up to a year in jail. Dissenting Democratic lawmakers tried to strip the provision from the bill, but failed in a 56-75, mostly party-line vote.

One of the lawmakers pushing the bill, GOP Rep. Tony Cornish, wears a lapel pin of a pair of handcuffs in his official legislative photo. “Cities and counties are forced to waste their tax dollars not only to protect property and remove and transport these lawbreakers, but to clean up the damage they create,” Cornish said in February justifying legislation to increase penalties levied against highway protesters.

Marching onto major highways and forcing traffic to stop has become a fixture of Black Lives movement protests since 2014 — with protesters in cities including Atlanta, Miami, Austin, and others using the shutdowns to draw attention to police brutality. But the tactic predates the Black Lives movement, and has in the past proved to be a successful way to force people to pay attention, such as when it was used as part of the Justice for Janitors unionization campaign in the 1990’s in Washington, D.C.

Disrupting Business as Usual

To detractors, the blockades disrupt the lives of bystanders and ordinary commuters, while endangering the lives of protesters. When Atlanta protesters aligned with the Black Lives movement blockaded I-75 in July 2016, for instance, the city’s African-American mayor, Kasim Reed, complained that “Dr. King would never take a freeway in the dangerous fashion that demonstrators in Atlanta this weekend tried to block our downtown interstate.”

He noted that during civil rights movement marches, the “streets were closed in advance. They involved extensive communication with local elected officials and law-enforcement.”

The highway blockades, by contrast, have been conducted without permits or advanced notice.

But that’s exactly what makes them so effective, proponents of the tactic say. The goal is to disrupt normal life, in order to call attention to important causes.

“I think the idea is to disrupt business as usual and taking over a highway is a powerful way to send a message across,” said Moumita Ahmed, a New York City activist who helped block FDR Drive and Lincoln Tunnel in New York City following the news that the police officer who put Eric Garner in a chokehold would not be indicted by state officials. The message, she said is “that we as protesters are willing to put our bodies on the line so you notice.”

When asked why they chose this highly confrontational tactic over more conventional forms, Ahmed replied, “This form of escalation is necessary because it’s clearly the one the … media chooses to focus on. We are just doing whatever it takes to get the message out.”