ÌìÃÀÊÓƵ

Just after midnight Tuesday in New York, police cleared the birthplace of the Occupy Wall Street movement in a surprise raid, arresting scores of protesters.

Just before noon across the country in Honolulu, their compatriots complained of a new local threat to free speech and free assembly rights. A proposed bill would allow the city to confiscate all personal belongings left or kept on public property for more than 24 hours.

making its way through the Honolulu City Council had previously drawn fire as an attack on the city’s many homeless, who often set up shop with tents and shopping carts on sidewalks and in parks. Proponents denied that was their intent.

But with Occupy Honolulu taking hold as a semi-permanent fixture at the corner of Beretania Street and Ward Avenue, protesters have taken notice of the Council’s proposal and see it as a potential threat not just to the homeless but also to First Amendment rights for all citizens.

Tulsi Gabbard, chair of the Committee on Safety, Economic Development and Government Affairs and the bill’s sponsor, said Tuesday she was receptive to the concerns raised by Occupy Honolulu.

“We had not heard any testimony prior to today on that subject,” Gabbard told Civil Beat. “And I thought it was a great point that was brought up and something that we all need to be aware of. With this legislation, and with all legislation, this one of the things we love about our country, and we need to make sure we protect it.”

One critic of the local bill said the actions by New York’s police to clear out the encampment there show why the proposal is dangerous.

“That’s, I think, very relevant,” Sadie Green, one of the protesters, said in testimony Tuesday morning. “Taking people’s property from them is illegal.”

Green, reviewing the New York court ruling on her smartphone, called the Honolulu proposal “a form of structural violence” that would inhibit the right to assemble and would directly conflict with people’s rights as outlined in both the Hawaii and U.S. Constitutions. She was one of about a half-dozen occupiers who showed up to testify in person at Honolulu Hale.

In New York, a judge that protesters could return to Zuccotti Park with their belongings. Within hours, though, another New York that the city was within its rights to enforce rules against camping in the public park.

“The Court is mindful of movants’ First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and peaceable assembly,” the judge wrote. “However, ‘[e]ven protected speech is not equally permissible in all places and at all times.'”

“To the extent that City law prohibits the erection of structures, the use of gas or other combustible materials, and the accumulation of garbage and human waste in public places, enforcement of the law and the owner’s rules appears reasonable to permit the owner to maintain its space in a hygienic, safe, and lawful condition,” the ruling said.

In Honolulu, protesters worried the proposed rule would allow the city to “take my speech away,” as Joseph Heaukulani put it. The protesters are not trying to assert their right to be in the Honolulu park overnight. But they don’t want their tents or signs confiscated from their sidewalk encampment.

“If there was some provision to guarantee that our First Amendment (rights) would be protected, then I would be more in favor of this bill, but currently I am opposed,” Heaukulani said. “I’m just talking about the right to assemble and the right to speak on a continual basis.”

Committee Vice Chair Tom Berg told some testifiers that the proposal would provide rules ahead of time so that they wouldn’t have to deal with a “wayward, Wild West” situation like the surprise early morning raid in New York.

Jamie Baldwin shot back that “Bill 54 would disallow those protesters from being there in the first place.”

According to the police blotter, Baldwin was among those arrested last week for refusing to leave Thomas Square Park after it closed at 10 p.m. She told the committee she recently became “houseless.”

“If you don’t have a home, where else are you supposed to put your stuff?” she asked. She told members that confiscating people’s belongings would send a message that if you don’t have an apartment or a car, then you’re not allowed to keep your belongings with you.

After taking testimony, the committee recessed to allow other committees to work on their agendas. Discussion and decision-making on the bill will take place at 2:30 p.m. Thursday.

Gabbard said she intends to confer with the city’s lawyers, as well as Constitutional law professor Jon Van Dyke, about the potential “unintended consequences” of the legislation, and whether the proposal aligns with the First Amendment.

Asked for her thoughts on the Occupy Honolulu movement, Gabbard said it “speaks to the growing frustration by people in general, whether they’re participating actively or not, just the frustration that their voices are not being heard by those in leadership.”

Read previous Civil Beat stories about Occupy Honolulu and Hawaii homelessness at those topic pages.