The Cincinnati Beacon - Flashback: Coates v. City of Cincinnati

This week, some colleagues and I were in City Hall, asking two police officers questions about how certain laws get enforced. One officer invited us to ask as many questions as we wanted, and the other kept cutting us off, telling us to stop asking questions. This was confusing. Ultimately, they decided to order us out of the building, under threat of arrest (charges of “disorderly conduct"), and that if we didn’t like it our lawyers could work it out in court. Is that the kind of treatment we, the citizens, deserve at the hands of Cincinnati Police inside City Hall, a public building? That is how some of your fellow citizens were treated this week. So it’s time for a history lesson: Coates v. City of Cincinnati, a case heard before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971.

Back then, the City of Cincinnati made it illegal to be annoying, writing an ordinance outlawing “three or more persons to assemble . . . on any of the sidewalks . . . and there conduct themselves in a manner annoying to persons passing by . . .” The case made it all the way to our Country’s highest court, who found the following:

But the vice of the ordinance lies not alone in its violation of the due process standard of vagueness. The ordinance also violates the constitutional right of free assembly and association. Our decisions establish that mere public intolerance or animosity cannot be the basis for abridgment of these constitutional freedoms. See Street v. New York, 394 U.S. 576, 592 ; Cox v. Louisiana, 379 U.S. 536, 551 -553; Edwards v. South Carolina, 372 U.S. 229, 238 ; Terminiello v. Chicago, 337 U.S. 1 ; Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296, 311 ; Schneider v. State, 308 U.S. 147, 161 . The First and Fourteenth Amendments do not permit a State to make criminal the exercise of the right of assembly simply because its exercise may be “annoying” to some people. If this were not the rule, the right of the people to gather in public places for social or political purposes would be continually subject to summary suspension through the good-faith enforcement of a prohibition against annoying conduct. [402 U.S. 611, 616] And such a prohibition, in addition, contains an obvious invitation to discriminatory enforcement against those whose association together is “annoying” because their ideas, their lifestyle, or their physical appearance is resented by the majority of their fellow citizens.

The ordinance before us makes a crime out of what under the Constitution cannot be a crime. It is aimed directly at activity protected by the Constitution. We need not lament that we do not have before us the details of the conduct found to be annoying. It is the ordinance on its face that sets the standard of conduct and warns against transgression. The details of the offense could no more serve to validate this ordinance than could the details of an offense charged under an ordinance suspending unconditionally the right of assembly and free speech.

We need to be careful when an unchecked police force is allowed to turn a public building like City Hall into a police state. Kicking people out of City Hall for asking questions and then threatening to arrest those citizens for “disorderly conduct” begs a question of how to define “disorderly.” Cincinnati has a history of trying to define words like this on their own, and when taken to our land’s highest court, Cincinnati lost.

According to the State of Ohio, one is guilty of disorderly conduct when engaged in the following:

(A) No person shall recklessly cause inconvenience, annoyance, or alarm to another by doing any of the following:

(1) Engaging in fighting, in threatening harm to persons or property, or in violent or turbulent behavior;

(2) Making unreasonable noise or an offensively coarse utterance, gesture, or display or communicating unwarranted and grossly abusive language to any person;

(3) Insulting, taunting, or challenging another, under circumstances in which that conduct is likely to provoke a violent response;

(4) Hindering or preventing the movement of persons on a public street, road, highway, or right-of-way, or to, from, within, or upon public or private property, so as to interfere with the rights of others, and by any act that serves no lawful and reasonable purpose of the offender;

(5) Creating a condition that is physically offensive to persons or that presents a risk of physical harm to persons or property, by any act that serves no lawful and reasonable purpose of the offender.

Asking police officers questions about how laws are enforced cannot be “disorderly” under this definition. Is there another code I’m missing? The ORC clearly states that “‘Disorderly activities’ are those that harass, threaten or physically harm another person including threats or other menacing behavior, fighting, assaults and brawls or any violation as defined by the Ohio Revised Code section 2917.11.”

Some may here focus on the word “harass,” but asking questions about the law of law enforcement officers hardly qualifies as causing pointless emotional or physical stress, so I don’t think that applies.

Being annoying is not against the law. Being a participant in civics is a constitutionally guaranteed right. The police should not be permitted to terrorize people for asking questions.

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