The city council has passed Mayor Michelle Wu’s proposal that would essentially ban the kind of early-morning targeted protests that have dogged her and other local officials.
The city council approved the measure by a 9-4 vote on Wednesday, with perhaps its two furthest right and two furthest left members voting against the ordinance change.
The new rule, which Wu’s office said she expects to sign in the coming days, effectively would bar the noisy dawn anti-vaccine-mandate protesters — now mixed with North End restaurant demonstrators — who have been happening outside her Roslindale home for the past few months.
The law will allow police to ticket people who are targeting people in their homes with loud protests between 9 p.m. and 9 a.m.
“This ordinance balances the needs of our residents to have an expectation of privacy and peace in their homes in the early morning hours with the right to protest,” said Council Government Operations Chair Ricardo Arroyo, who’s running for DA and has seen protesters show up at his home recently.
Casting the nay votes were City Councilors Frank Baker, Kendra Lara, Julia Mejia and Erin Murphy. Baker and Murphy are two of the more conservative members on the body and said they opposed the move on free-speech grounds, and Lara and Mejia, two of the more progressive councilors, have said they worried this could limit other protests.
Baker in particular fumed that he’d been harassed by progressives two years ago, with people “creeping around” his house and, he said, throwing fireworks at it, but no one tried to help him out with any laws then.
“Now because this is happening to one person we’re going to change all the rules,” Baker said.
City Councilor Kenzie Bok said Baker’s botherment in 2020 — and the papers that one progressive group glued on the properties of every councilor who voted for the city’s budget later that year — should be seen as leading to this ordinance. “It’s more like we’ve got a consistent pattern here.”
Council President Ed Flynn had police boot a couple of protesters who began to shout at the council as the members deliberated.
