ACLU on the Oakland Protest Curfew: Let the People March

https://www.aclunc.org/blog/aclu-oakland-protest-curfew-let-people-march


OPD’s rollout of a curfew on protests is problematic for a number of reasons:

• A blanket ban on non-permitted protests after dark is in violation of OPD’s Crowd Control Policy. (This policy is a result of a 2003 court settlement between OPD, the ACLU-NC and the National Lawyers’ Guild after OPD unleashed severe violence against protesters at the Port of Oakland.)
• There isn’t a sundown exception to the First Amendment. We don’t want to live in a police state in which you can’t demonstrate at night. 
• When there is a major shift in a police department’s policy or practice, it needs to be clear and transparent so that people demonstrating know what the ground rules are.

Oakland developed a drastic change in the rules behind closed doors and imposed it, with no notice, on peaceful demonstrators who were anticipating an evening march. Whatever the city’s intention was, officials should have predicted that this would unnecessarily create or heighten tension.