COPS STOMP FREE SPEECH

Feb. 23 - Denver police grossly exceeded their authority Monday when
they broke up a peaceful protest on the 16th Street Mall, claiming
that any complaint about a demonstraton trumps the First Amendment.

This outrageous conduct by police not only violated the activists'
constitutional rights, but also poured more fuel onto the
conflagration already raging over the senseless death of Ismael Mena.

The protesters were on the mall to distribute leaflets demanding
justice for Mena, who was killed during a botched no-knock police drug
raid.

The citizenry's faith in Denver police has been seriously shaken since
Mena's slaying last September and since a special prosecutor decided
to charge only one officer, for perjuring himself to obtain the search
warrant for the raid.

To further erode residents' faith in police by shutting down
demonstrators - who were protesting that very shooting, no less - was
an incredibly imbecilic move.

It also was most assuredly illegal. The freedom to conduct peaceful
protests is one of the basic rights granted to all Americans. If, as
police contend, someone had complained about the noise level of the
protesters, then officers should have asked the group to quiet down or
perhaps move down the sidewalk a bit.

But the very notion that a complain can trump the First Amendment is
indefensible.

Furthermore, the police action directly contradicts previous responses
to people who also were exercising their First Amendment right.

When concentrated groups of antiabortionists have crowded onto a
street corner near Denver's Planned Parenthood clinic, waving placards
of fetuses and screaming at clinic clientele, police rarely have intervened.

Yet when police themselves are the target of the protest, it appears
that intervention is appropriate.

The founders created this country as a bastion of freedom after
fleeing the constraints then imposed on people in England. Yet today,
the British gather every Sunday at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park to
orate their views before one and all.

The very idea that Americans cannot do the same, on the 16th Street
Mall or elsewhere, is an appalling convolution of the basic concepts
of our republic. Denver police owe an apology to the Justice for Mena
Committee - and to us all.