Occupy Fresno arrests a waste of money

By Bill McEwen

If you want to see tax dollars wasted, go to Courthouse Park.

I showed up Wednesday morning to check out Occupy Fresno. There was one Occupier: Pat Sigala, 67, disabled and a past recipient of the Center for Nonviolence's Way of Peace award.

Fifteen yards from Sigala were three sheriff's deputies – in a county that doesn't have money to keep car thieves and burglars in jail.

Sigala was among eight protesters arrested Monday for being in the park between midnight and 6 a.m. About 30 people had been taken to jail through Wednesday.

Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims agrees that her budget dollars are better spent elsewhere. But she disagrees with my view that her deputies shouldn't arrest the protesters.

Says Mims: "You bet I have concerns about the cost. This would stop if they complied with the law." This staredown could go on for a spell – even though the nights are cold.

Sigala, a former farm-labor organizer, says that he's willing to be arrested again to draw attention to America's economic crisis.

"Whatever it takes," he says.

All the while, the taxpayer meter rolls. Mims dispatches deputies to arrest protesters and still more deputies to videotape the arrests. Time and money will be spent arguing against Occupy Fresno's bid for a restraining order ending the arrests. If District Attorney Elizabeth Egan is crazy enough to prosecute, there's no telling what the final tab will be.

The sheriff's job is to protect the public. These arrests don't accomplish that. The protesters aren't a threat. They've been peaceful and respectful. This isn't Oakland spiraling violently out of control. Moreover, Occupy Fresno started without a permit to assemble in the park. No one was arrested – despite staying past midnight. It got a permit. No arrests. The permit expired. Now protesters are Public Enemy No. 1.

Whether Occupy Fresno gets a restraining order is anybody's guess. Government can regulate speech and assembly as long as it doesn't try to control the message or play favorites, says Jeffrey Purvis, a constitutional law professor at San Joaquin College of Law.

"It depends on the exact wording of the ordinance and then the manner that Sheriff Mims applies it," Purvis says.

Robert Navarro, a lawyer, was among those arrested Sunday. He says that the county should waive the rule that people must leave the park at midnight and allow protesters a "24/7 presence" as other cities are doing.

"We believe that the need to get a permit and the closure provision are unduly restrictive," Navarro says.

James Madison, primary author of the Constitution and author of the Bill of Rights, predicted the conditions that would give birth to something like the Occupy movement.

He wrote: "We are free today substantially but the day will come when our Republic will be an impossibility. It will be an impossibility because wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a few. A republic cannot stand upon bayonets, and when that day comes, when the wealth of the nation will be in the hands of a few, then we must rely upon the wisdom of the best elements in the country to readjust the laws of the nation to the changed conditions."

In Fresno and elsewhere, the wait for such wisdom continues.