On a Monday morning earlier last month, several hundred people gathered at New York City Hall, where a small cadre of professional activists gave them lock-on arm tubes, banners, fluorescent vests, and instructions to disperse to either the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, Williamsburg Bridge, or Holland Tunnel. There, they locked themselves together and strode into oncoming traffic, effectively blocking four of the most heavily traveled entryways into the borough. The tactic, they later proudly declared to the press, was to simulate a siege. “In Gaza, of course, people have limited mobility, no freedom of movement, they cannot leave, even if they wanted to,” one participant told The New York Times, “we wanted to create that condition temporarily in Manhattan.”

What followed is a familiar story that has played out in major cities across the country: the traffic obstructors managed to block drivers for hours until police intervened, arrested hundreds, and cleared the roads. As River Page recently covered, these kinds of disruptive protests are almost never spontaneous expressions of outrage from organically mobilized crowds, but highly coordinated, well-funded attempts to block major thoroughfares at peak transit hours to make political statements. (The Manhattan “siege,” for instance, was sponsored in part by Jewish Voice for Peace, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from donor-advised funds run by Schwab, Morgan Stanley, and Fidelity.)

The First Amendment protects the right to peaceful assembly, but not to intentional traffic obstruction — a serious offense that can slow drivers headed to urgent appointments (like the emergency vehicle carrying transplant organs held up at the recent Bay Bridge shut-down). Those who intentionally block bridges or roads could face charges like false imprisonment, obstruction of public ways, and public nuisance, some of which carry considerable civil and criminal penalties. Given the risks, why do so many feel emboldened to break the law?

The short answer is that, in general, they know they’ll get away with it. Follow the trajectory of those arrested for traffic obstruction in cities from New York, to Los Angeles, to San Francisco, and you’ll find that, almost invariably, they either never face charges or eventually have any charges dropped.

In fact, from the Floyd riots of 2020 to today, activists have successfully managed to invert the consequences for engaging in many forms of illegal protest — including traffic obstruction, trespassing, and rioting — to their material benefit. The playbook works roughly as follows: activists, financed by millions of dollars in tax-deductible nonprofit donations, organize protests designed to maximally disrupt everyday life; police arrest and immediately release them (in effect producing earned media used to garner donors and sympathy); the activists enlist progressive litigators (like the ACLU) to sue cities for alleged mistreatment at the hands of police; and the city coughs up tens of thousands of dollars in class action settlements paid out directly to individual protestors.

Nowhere is this playbook clearer than in New York, where a professional activist class has begun routinely holding commuters hostage — blocking the entrance to JFK on New Year’s Day, shutting down the Manhattan Bridge in late November, and forcing the closure of Grand Central in October. All of this is carried out with the tacit permission of the police, who generally refrain from intervening until enough havoc has been wrecked. Their laxity may stem from a September 2023 settlement between the NYPD and ACLU, which sued the department over allegations of excessive force use during the 2020 George Floyd riots. (The context for this “excessive force,” it bears recalling, was mass looting and arson that severely damaged over 450 businesses and 300 police cars across the city, and caused an estimated $2 billion in insured damages across the country.)

Per the settlement, which is still pending approval from the court, NYPD agreed to no longer “kettle” protesters (surround them in an effort to restrict their movement). It also agreed to follow a novel ‘four-tiered’ approach to handling protests that prevents officers from dispersing road-obstructors, making arrests, or even appearing in view of protesters until they have consulted with the “[First Amendment Activity] Senior Executive” — a settlement-created role for someone “holding the rank of Deputy Chief or higher” who will act as an NYPD-wide “compliance manager.” Without this bureaucratic approval, officers are required to essentially facilitate obstructionists; “tier one” (the default response) stipulates that, if a protest “temporarily blocks vehicular or pedestrian traffic or otherwise obstructs public streets or sidewalks, the NYPD shall whenever possible accommodate [it]” — even if this involves “deploy[ing] patrol officers to reroute vehicular or pedestrian traffic.”

Floyd-era settlements similar to the NYPD-ACLU one will likely follow elsewhere. The City of Los Angeles, for instance, is currently facing a class action lawsuit brought by Black Lives Matter - Los Angeles, which alleges that, in 2020, LAPD violated a 2007 settlement dictating police “must facilitate protests and issue instructions via a loud speaker in the event that a protest blocks traffic, rather than attempt to disrupt the protest.” A separate lawsuit brought by individual protesters alleges LAPD mistreated them by denying “food, water, [and] access to bathrooms,” as well as by leaving them “in close quarters with maskless law enforcement agents…[when] the zip-tied protesters were unable to adjust their fallen masks.” “As such,” the complaint states, LAPD “weaponized the COVID-19 virus as punishment for the expression of truthful speech.”

The irony of these lawsuits, of course, is that almost none of the protesters arrested in the 2020 riots were actually prosecuted. An analysis conducted by the Guardian found over 90 percent of Floyd-related citations and charges filed across twelve jurisdictions (including Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis) were dropped. And in New York, months after the city paid tens of thousands of dollars in emergency relief funds to business owners whose storefronts were destroyed by rioters, DAs across boroughs quietly let off the hundreds arrested for trespassing and disorderly conduct scot-free.

But not only were most of the arrested Floyd protesters released immediately, many were also paid handsomely for their trouble. In New York, officials agreed to pay nearly 1,400 protesters who “were arrested and/or subjected to force” by NYPD officers $9,950 apiece ($13.7 million total), after they enlisted the National Lawyers Guild, a progressive legal nonprofit, to represent them in a class action lawsuit against the city. In Philadelphia, the city agreed to pay $9.25 million to 343 protesters — an astounding $27,000 per person — in a similar class action lawsuit led by the NAACP-affiliated Legal Defense Fund. Combined, cities across the country paid at least $80 million to Floyd-era protesters, including:

• In Minneapolis, where mass looting and arson damaged over 1,300 businesses, caused over $107 million in property damage, and even killed a man trapped in a burning pawn shop, 12 protesters who claimed they had been injured received a $600,000 settlement from the city ($50,000 apiece).

• In Seattle, where protesters occupied and vandalized the entire Capitol Hill neighborhood, 50 protesters alleging “permanent hearing loss, broken bones, concussions, wounds, bruising and emotional damage” caused by police received a $10 million settlement from the city ($200,000 apiece).

• In Denver, where riots cost the government and private businesses over $5.5 million in property damage, 300 protesters who accused police of using excessive force when detaining them for violating an emergency curfew received a $4.7 million settlement from the city ($15,666 apiece).

This time around, the timeline is progressing near-identically. After last month’s “siege,” the NYPD Chief of Patrol reported they had arrested 325 protesters, many of whom “will face misdemeanor charges with a desk appearance ticket [a written order to appear in criminal court on a specific date].” But it’s ultimately up to Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez — both of whom are notoriously progressive prosecutors — to decide whether to pursue these charges, and neither has given any indication they will. (When we submitted a Freedom of Information Law request to NYPD to learn which misdemeanors protesters were charged with, we were told to “expect a response on or about Monday, June 3, 2024.”)

Similarly, in Los Angeles, where 75 protesters were detained after shutting down portions of the southbound I-10 freeway at rush hour, City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto has given no indication she intends to pursue charges. (When we submitted a public records request to her office, which is responsible for prosecuting misdemeanors in the City of Los Angeles, we were told they had “no responsive records related to [the] incident.") This, again, mirrors the aftermath of the Floyd protests in LA, when around 93% of protest-related citations were ultimately not filed by then-City Attorney Mike Feuer. There is little reason to think class action lawsuits alleging mistreatment at the hands of cops will not soon follow.

Would hard-nosed DAs unafraid to prosecute road-obstructors solve the problem? Maybe, though they would also run the risk of turning otherwise unremarkable protesters, who expected to sacrifice nothing in their pursuit of justice, into political martyrs — however far-fetched and unserious this may seem. This seems a likely outcome of San Francisco DA Brooke Jenkins’ exceptional decision to charge 78 protesters involved in the November shut-down of the Bay Bridge with five misdemeanors, including false imprisonment and refusal to comply with a peace officer, both of which can carry sentences of up to a year in jail. Jenkins has justified these charges by citing the uniquely disruptive behavior of the Bay Bridge protesters, who stopped their cars on the bridge, threw their keys into the Bay, and then chained themselves to each other and the bridge, as other drivers helplessly looked on.

Yet a trial may ultimately prove to the benefit of the protesters, who have quickly been branded the “Bay Bridge 78” (a call-back to the Vietnam War-era Chicago Seven) by sympathetic fellow activists and politicians. Why? Mainly because they have been martyrized by their supporters, who have already packed courts and held rallies in their honor. But also because their case is being heard in San Francisco’s notoriously liberal Superior Court — and thus in all likelihood will end in dropped charges or a not-guilty verdict.

Regardless, we should commend Jenkins’ courageous attempt to enforce the law. Officials in other cities have largely thrown up their hands and kow-towed to activists, who have thus managed to transform obstruction of public property from a crime to an acceptable (and lucrative) protest tactic. At least in San Francisco there is still hope those who blocked the bridge will face consequences. Elsewhere, we can be sure protesters will continue blocking roads, suing cities, and pocketing settlement money.

-Sanjana Friedman