Lyons: Arrest's 'YouTube' moment unnecessary
The defense attorney who is taking the chalk-arrest case for free summed up Chris Young's treatment pretty well in a few words.
"It's so ticky tacky," attorney Derek Byrd said.
Young, 40, is a long-haired, bearded Iraq war veteran and former truck driver who uses a cane to assist him when walking. A Sarasota Police officer arrested him over the weekend, after Young allegedly didn't comply with an order to stop writing with chalk on the walkway at downtown Sarasota's Five Points Park.
The arrest at a peaceful Occupy Sarasota protest shocked many protesters and bystanders. It seemed out of the blue.
Byrd said Monday that the disabled man was just surprised at the orders and was asking questions about how he was breaking the law, all while grabbing his cane to get from his knees to his feet, a slow process because of his disability.
Byrd said Officer John Neri even grabbed Young's cane, perhaps fearing it could be used as a weapon, despite Young's peaceful "make love not war" and "give peace a chance" chalk messages.
I asked Sarasota City Commissioner Shannon Snyder — an ex-cop — what he thought about the arrest.
Snyder insisted the city has a proper interest in keeping chalk off the bricks at Five Points. He called it an "aesthetics issue."
"The city has an obligation to control its property," Snyder said. Protesters have been doing the chalk thing for weeks, and "they weren't cleaning it up. They were leaving it there, as part of their protest."
Still, Snyder said police did not handle it very well.
"My question would be, who at the command level didn't think this out?" He said the city has had "a good relationship" with the protesters, and described the demonstrators as congenial. "Why not keep the good relationship?" he asked.
Good question. Too dull, maybe?
Snyder said police supervisors could have talked to protest leaders and suggested other spots where chalk would be acceptable. And if that didn't work, the chalker could have been issued a citation rather than arrested.
That could have avoided "the YouTube moment," he said, of the officer standing over Young with his knee in the protester's back. Snyder insisted some protesters had been wanting one of those.
Not Young, it seems. He isn't even sure he is an Occupy protester. He says he feels supportive of them but didn't even know they would be there that day.
Snyder is right that there was no need for fast action. Police — if really convinced that chalk was a problem — could have conferred and negotiated at length before acting. Instead, an officer winged it while responding to one of the most trivial, non-urgent phoned-in complaints ever.
Police Chief Mikel Hollaway did not return my calls. I have to hope he more-or-less agrees with Snyder.
But I'd rather that city officials were worried less about the publicity of a "YouTube moment" — a phrase Snyder used numerous times — than about the overreaction to a peaceful act that was at most a very tiny problem.
Yes, the officer found an ordinance that just might — might — make using chalk on the walkway unlawful. But if you were hatching a plan to convince people that Sarasota police have too little to do and are prone to curing their boredom by launching confrontations over piddly things, this incident would be perfect.
Or almost. Perfection would require the arrested chalker be a kindergartner drawing a hopscotch board.
The arresting officer's supervisor, working hard to make chalk-writing a big deal, compared it to the Sarasota Chalk Festival, meaning that since the festival has to get a permit, Young would need one, too.
Wow. The festival's numerous artists uses many hundreds of dollars worth of chalk doing huge drawings that cover an entire street. Traffic is detoured for a week. Tens of thousand of people congregate to see the artworks.
Young used maybe 10 cents worth of chalk and wrote about 10 words on a wide sidewalk, leaving room to spare for pedestrians to pass.
Makes you wonder who really craved a YouTube moment.