Interesting First Amendment question from a reader in Staunton, who was approached by police over the weekend, after writing, in chalk, on a green sign near City Hall, “Good cops leak to the press.”
“Stop writing stuff on city property,” an officer told the reader, who had also fashioned an abandoned piece of cardboard into a protest sign bearing the message, “The best cops blow the whistle.”
Good messages, by the way, against the backdrop of the last few weeks, with folks raising issues with Staunton Police over their kid-gloves handling of the guy who drove recklessly through the middle of a political protest, a second guy who brandished a gun at said political protest, and a third guy who threatened to kill people attending a different political protest two weeks later.
Guess that threatening people with a two-ton truck, a gun and whatever the guy who said he was “locked and loaded” had in his gym bag, those are moral equivalents to scrawling chalk on a signpost.
Which is to say, a guy with a neo-Nazi sticker on the bumper of his truck is just exercising his First Amendment rights when he’s “rolling coal”; brandishing a gun, that’s First and Second Amendment all rolled into one.
Verbal threats: obvious free speech.
ICYMI
- Staunton: Magistrate issues warrant in ‘rolling coal’ incident at April 5 protest
- Staunton Police arrest, then quickly release, man who shouted death threats at protest
- Witness: ‘Agitated’ man in truck brandished gun at Staunton protest rally
“The question will be, does writing in regular chalkboard chalk on the signposts or other non-privately owned surfaces in town meet the definition of ‘damage,’ or does writing words that are not obscene ‘deface’ or ‘injure’ ‘city property’ ‘generally’?” the reader queried me, in an email.
The references are to a relevant city code section that declares “(I)t shall be unlawful for any person to willfully damage or deface any city property,” and sets out a process for the city to recover damages.
In the case of the chalk message, the “damage” would probably be limited to the value of the wet wipe used by an officer to erase the message from the sign.
“I’m no lawyer. It must be impossible by now that a matter like this has remained unsettled before the courts,” the reader posited.
I dunno. Seems to me that this one is a law on the books that’s just, you know, there.
It would, if you ask me, be worth risking getting arrested over.
Seriously, dare ’em – you guys didn’t do anything to the truck driver, the guy with the gun, the guy threatening to kill people, but you’ll take me downtown over chalk?
I think we have an idea for our next mass protest.
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Chris Graham
