I dunno about you, but that's not really how I want our society to work.
As other people have point out, the robot could have navigated around the blockage. Just as you could walk away from someone bothering you without getting the police involved lol.
No, my claim is that people who violate public order laws in the public street should be arrested even if they claim that the reason it's important for them to violate those public order laws is because they're protesting something and a protest won't be effective unless it annoys people. I want that to not be an effective defense against getting immediately arrested and physically removed from the scene by cops.
And I do actually want immediate arrest and physical removal to be the default first response in a situation like an effective protest. I do not want people to get away with disrupting the public commons and then claiming that they were justified in doing so because they were carrying out a protest. Indeed, I want the police to immediately arrest and physically remove anyone at all who is disrupting the public commons. The police are a weapon, and I want that weapon used effectively against people who disrupt the public commons, so that the public commons can be usable by everyone.
I don't think that the entirety of the public commons needs 100% uptime. Occasional disruption could happen for any number of reasons like temporary events, construction, and protest [0].
"Immediate" action is such a strange requirement to have. Such a desire seems like a waste of police time. Like in TFA's example , the commons were ever so slightly disrupted: anyone could have gone around the woman. Occasional minor to moderate disruption of the commons for the purposes of free expression is a feature of our society that I think should be maintained.