Center for Justice weighs in (again) for street musicians being harassed on downtown sidewalks.
In a letter sent to the Downtown Spokane Partnership, the Spokane Transit Authority and five downtown Spokane businesses, Center for Justice lawyer Bonne Beavers is taking issue with what appears to be a growing trend of private security officers harassing street musicians.
“Over the past few months,” Beavers writes, “we have received complaints from street musicians about local security guards who threaten to arrest musicians and panhandlers for trespass on the basis that the sidewalk is for some reason ‘private.’ In some cases, the guards maintain an awning or other structure changes the sidewalk from a public to private space.”
In a direct sense, the fact that Beavers’s letter is even necessary confirms fears she and street musicians expressed in late 2008, when the city adopted controversial news ordinances to try to crack down on panhandling. Although Beavers, Gonzaga law school, and street musicians themselves were able to persuade the Spokane City Council to drop many of the more Constitutionally objectionable provisions from the ordinances and add clarifying language, Beavers said at the time that she was still concerned about enforcement.
At the time the ordinances were adopted, one of downtown’s most visible and gregarious performers, Rick Bocook (who performs under the name “Harpman Hatter”), both thanked the council for changing the ordinance and warned them that over-aggressive downtown businesses would still try to force him and others away from their premises.
“I don’t want to get harassed when I’m playing music,” he said.
In response, Council President Joe Shogan invited Bocook to contact the City Attorney’s office if he was being pestered.
“Okay,” Bocook replied the Shogan, “I can accept that, but I just wanted to make sure I brought these issues up.”
The language the council added, at his and Beavers’s and others’ requests, did seek to clarify the rights the Bocook says he expects to enjoy:
“Constitutionally protected expressive activities conducted in the public-right-of-way shall include, but is not limited to, street performers.”–From Ordinance C34339 adopted November 24, 2008.
Today, Bocook is frustrated because, as he feared, several local businesses and the private security people they employ still don’t accept the First Amendment protections in the city code. And, he says, he and other street musicians downtown are still being threatened with arrest by security guards and police.
“I’m not the only one upset about it,” Bocook says. “Others are experiencing the same thing but they don’t want to deal with it, they just want to be left alone.”
“We spoke with Assistant City Attorney Mike Piccolo in November about these interactions,” Beavers wrote in her letter this week. “Mr. Piccolo then conducted a search to determine whether any of these businesses had an agreement with the City which might suffice to change the character of these sidewalks from public to private. Finding no such agreements, Mr. Piccolo assured us the City would advise local law enforcement and security that this was not a basis for denying street musicians or others their right to engage in protected First Amendment activity on city sidewalks. Unfortunately, it appears these problems persist.”
Bocook says a key to protecting his and others’ First Amendment rights is knowledge of the law by Spokane police officers. It’s a sensitive subject for him because, he says, he’s really trying to de-escalate the confrontations and develop a positive dialogue with police officers. Still, he says, there are officers who, in apparent ignorance of the city’s own ordinance, intervene on the side of business owners and private security guards to threaten street musicians with citations.
“The police are supposed to uphold the Constitution and that’s what I’d like to see them do,” Bocook said this week. “When a security person asks me to leave a sidewalk the police need to come down on my side, not the security guard’s. That’s the way I look at it. It’s black and white and there’s nothing very complicated about it.”
Beavers, in her letter, informed the businesses and business groups that the law “is clear” that performances on city sidewalks are protected by the First Amendment. “As such,” she cautioned, “litigation on this issue would be a waste of public and private resources.”
–CFJ
For more on this subject, read Daniel Walters’s 1/21/10 story in The Inlander here.
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