For the first time in 14 years, it will be possible this fall for people of goodwill in Denver to feel good about the Columbus Day parade.
The city of Denver has finally passed two ordinances that make it very likely that protesters who directly interfere with the parade can be successfully arrested, prosecuted and, where appropriate, fined and put in jail.
The ordinances were approved last month with far too little fanfare, given the sordid history that has attended the annual Columbus Day event.
It would be nice now if the city’s belated action could be given three cheers. As it turns out, one cheer is probably enough. The city, you see, was more or less compelled to act.
Local judges last year had invalidated the ordinances that were used in the unsuccessful attempt to prosecute more than 200 people who had disrupted last year’s parade. Inaction wasn’t really an option.
The new ordinances prohibit the intentional disruption of lawful assemblies, such as parades, and the obstruction of streets. A new standard is also outlined for police and firefighters in dispersing a crowd.
Defendants from last year’s parade, it should be remembered, claimed they didn’t know or couldn’t be sure they were disobeying a police order to move on. The new standard punishes anyone who knows or “reasonably should know” that the person ordering them to disperse is a “peace officer, a firefighter, or a person with authority to control the use of the premises.”
One might suppose that free-speech organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union would be celebrating the passage of these ordinances. One would be wrong. The ACLU has refused prior requests to support the Italian organizers of the annual parade and the free-speech interests of the participants. The organization instead has fretted for years that the Denver Police Department has been paying too much attention to some of the most well-known parade protesters, like college professors Ward Churchill and Glenn Morris. Both men were among eight defendants acquitted earlier this year, putting an end to the city’s attempts to prosecute the other cases.
Not surprisingly, Morris used the occasion of his acquittal to call on Mayor John Hickenlooper and the City Council to say that city would no longer welcome Columbus Day celebrations.
Hickenlooper, in something less than a profile in courage, responded that the city would neither endorse nor oppose an official state or national decision to end the holiday. In a later session with some parade organizers, Hickenlooper actually suggested the name of the fall celebration be changed to eliminate any reference to Columbus. He went on to give his not very helpful opinion that the parade was simply generating “bad publicity” for the Italian community each year.
These kinds of misguided comments fit all too neatly into a familiar pattern of city conduct. During the Wellington Webb administration, there were actual attempts by the city to have the parade organizers effectively waive their First Amendment rights and give to the protest groups the right to define what could and could not be celebrated.
Even last year, Denver police allowed protesters to hold up the parade for 45 minutes, telling them that when they were ordered to disperse, they should disperse. They, of course, didn’t and more than 200 were eventually arrested. But what about that initial decision to conditionally permit the parade to be disrupted?
That decision is simply more evidence of the city’s underlying assumption, evident for more than a decade, that the Italian-Americans organizing the parade have fewer free-speech rights than other groups and that the protesters somehow have more.
What was nonsense then is nonsense still.
Attorney David Sprecace, who represents the parade organizers, put it best in a recent letter when he said, “Imagine the public outcry that would take place if a group of protesters violated Denver’s ordinances and stopped the Martin Luther King Parade, interfered with a Cesar Chavez celebration, blocked Federal Boulevard during Cinco de Mayo, or blocked a 4 Directions March?”
The question answers itself.
And yet, given recent history, the passage of the new ordinances finally gives hope that after a very long time, the city of Denver will finally stop bargaining away the free-speech interests of some of its citizens.
Al Knight of Fairplay (alknight@mindspring.com) is a former member of The Post’s editorial-page staff. His columns appear on Wednesday.
