Bar Urges Relaxing of Parade Rules
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The New York City Bar Association is pushing the city council to ease a police code that defines any gathering of 50 or more people as a “parade” requiring a permit from the police department.
“The police will inevitably engage in a wide degree of selective and discretionary enforcement, which has the very real potential for becoming a means for suppressing particular points of view,” the group’s president, Barry Kamins, warned in the letter to Council Speaker Christine Quinn.
Some critics have suggested that the permit code, enacted by the police department in February, is intended to suppress Critical Mass, an organization that engages in large group bike rides around the city.
In his letter, Mr. Kamins calls on the city council to hold public hearings and amend the code to more clearly define the police department’s authority in distributing permits.
In an opinion printed earlier this month in the New York Blade, Ms. Quinn said council staff convinced the police department to relax an original draft of the code, but added the department ultimately has the right to set parade rules without legislative input.