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Comment by freeflight | Hacker News Reader

> Not allowing freedom of assembly would have saved many lives in the protests that have swept the US, though potentially at the cost of slower social progress.

The US supreme court has established that the government can't regulate the content of speech, but the government is in its right to regulate the time, place and manner of speech. [0]

So it is very much a thing in the US and has been enforced plenty of times, for example during Occupy and even during BLM when protests were just declared as "riots" to then crack down on them with the full force of a militarized police arresting thousands of people [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone

[1] https://apnews.com/article/american-protests-us-news-arrests...

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> even during BLM when protests were just declared as "riots" to then crack down on them with the full force of a militarized police arresting thousands of people

Many Americans actually died in these events in addition to dangerous fires (with people still inside buildings!) and random acts of violence, so the riot characterization has at least in some cases been fair. It makes sense thousands of people would be arrested when hundreds of crimes have occurred.

The difference in the US is that these events could not be stopped from occurring, and people were not immediately arrested and water cannoned and so forth by police. It was only after the event grew and escalated and changed in nature.

That is where France differs — a protest can, from the beginning, be declared unable to occur, and police respond to it accordingly.

This is not at all to say that these events were all wrong or created with ill intent, but that there is a clear advantage and disadvantage to the right to freedom of assembly in the US.

> That is where France differs — a protest can, from the beginning, be declared unable to occur, and police respond to it accordingly.

I think you are misunderstanding what all of this actually means: The US government doesn't just have to tolerate protests anywhere anytime.

It is in its right to deem certain times, places and forms of expression as not valid, the only thing it can't regulate is the content of the expression.

So you are free to protests for whatever you want, but you are not free to do it whenever and wherever you want, the authorities have the last word on that, regardless of any violence or crimes happening.

I understand what you're referring to, but was aiming to explain the difference between the US and France in a more approachable way. The US could block a protest from occurring, but the legal basis would be much tougher than that in France (it's more protected in the US).

In the US, a court won't simply forbid a protest ahead of time because the issue was protested several years ago in the same neighborhood and it led to a riot.

> Many Americans actually died in these events

Did they? How many? And of those how many were killed by the police or far-right sympathisers like Kyle Rittenhouse?

25 Americans last I read. Almost all if not all were killed by fellow civilians, not police.

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