DC City Council To Pass A Bill Making Occupy Illegal

[Leopolds Ghost]

There's a new crime bill proposed in City Council that you may have heard about - it would severely restrict protest rights in DC by making it illegal to "block" parks and other spaces and to make noise in public buildings, and by putting an indefinite ban on people returning to public places where they've been told to disperse. We need to come together as an activist community and organize against this, and quickly - the bill goes before the Council on March 16th.

For more info follow occupydc or occupythevotedc on Twitter.

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Note that the DC Council recently passed a citywide chainge to its Noise and Nuisance Ordinance which even the Police Chief refuses to enforce because it is literally fascist.

The nuisance law, passed originally to address student noise complaints in Georgetown, allows police to come onto any premises, public or private, anywhere in the city (commercial or residential) and arrest the proprietor or person in charge of an event (e.g. on private property) at the officer's sole discretion in response to an anonymous noise or nuisance complaint. The complainant does not have to be directly adjacent or affected, and it doesn't matter if the venue is allowed to have such activities under (already incredibly oppressive in most municipalities) local zoning law.

I don't know if anyone's fighting the law in court, because like every other step to fascism, the result would probably be a Federal court decision declaring such things to be newly constitutional.