| I actually called the reporter, Jim Totten, of the Livingston Argus, last night, to verify that Police Chief Wightman of the City of Brighton actually said it. According to Totten's story yesterday, which I hadn't had time to dig up in my post then, the Chief took a whole new tack - the ordinance has worked. So amazingly well that it has never needed to be enforced because "so many people know about it" that they've been "deterred" (paraphrasing here). That is, Brighton is obviously now among the least annoying cities in the land, apparently. Their citizens are apparently more gentile than the citizens of other less enlightened towns without the regulation, or at least more cowered in their submission to and fear of Brighton policing powers. Why do I find that remarkable? First, it flips the City's initial whining about publicity being unfair on its head. Without the publicity, you can't have the deterrence. Second, it admits the goal all along was to have a "chilling effect" on speech. If people are aware of the law and have modified their speech - given the law's facial overbreadth and difficulty in defining - then those people have already experienced a negative First Amendment impact. That is, the Founders didn't envision a perfectly tame, bland, oatmeal-like civic discourse where the people or civic society is annoyance free. Being annoying - at times and within reason and the bounds of not physically or measurable way - is both a consequence of and necessity of truly free speech. The speech we all agree with needs to defender or First Amendment - the speech at annoys is most vulnerable.
I also found curious this clip:
"This ordinance is not there to violate one's constitutional freedom-of-speech rights," he said.
Wightman said he didn't know if officers had actually warned people they could be ticketed under the amended rules because that information "doesn't make it to me." He said officers don't report to him every warning they've issued.
Hmm. Does that mean you don't communicate well with your officers, or you just don't want to know on this issue. Or maybe you just don't want to be transparent about it. |
