THE COMMON LAW POWER OF THE POLICE TO CONTROL PUBLIC MEETINGS*
| Published date | 01 November 1973 |
| Author | William Birtles |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1973.tb01388.x |
| Date | 01 November 1973 |
THE
COMMON LAW POWER
OF
THE POLICE
TO
CONTROL
PUBLIC MEETINGS
*
1.
INTRODUCTION
THIS article is concerned with the common law power of the police
to disperse a public meeting which is being lawfully held. There
is
no
direct English authority
on
the matter, and the leading English
textbooks uncritically accept nineteenth century Irish cases which
give the police wide discretion to end public meetings where they
consider
a
breach of the peace is likely to occur. Whatever the
position may be in Ireland,a
it
is suggested that in England the
courts should not allow such a power at all, since the Irish cases
were decided under quite different political and social circumstances.
No
attempt is made here to deal with situations where a criminal
offence has been committed at
a
public meeting.
2.
ARREST
FOR
BREACH
OF
THE
PEACE^
Mention should, however, be made of the power of arrest
for
breach
of
the peace.
At common law anyone may arrest for a breach of the peace
committed in his presence
or
reasonably feared by him, provided
that the arrest
is
made with sufficient promptitude.
Precisely what constitutes a breach
of
the peace
is
difficult to
determine, since
cc
there is a surprising lack of authoritative defini-
tion of what one would suppose to be a fundamental concept of
the criminal Clearly riots, routs, affrays and fights are
breaches of the peace.
So
also is an unlawful assembly.
It
would
also seem that the following are sufficient to justify arrest for
disturbing a public meeting: threats of force to the person of
another, but not to property
;
verbal disorderliness where the
arrester believes the person to be
on
the point of committing
or
actually committing an act
of
violence-swearing
or
quarrelling
with words is not enough; inflammatory words where there is a
danger of violence from third parties. Despite some authority to
*
I
am grateful
to
Professor
S.
A.
de Smith for hie comments on an earlier draft
of
this
article.
Hood
Phillips,
Constitutional and Administratiwe Law
(5th ed.
1973),
438;
Wade snd Phillips,
Constittttional Law
(8th ed. 1970),
533;
Keir and Lawson,
Cases
in Constitutional Law
(5th
ed.
1967),
193-194; de Smith,
Constitutional
and Administrative Law
(1971),
490.
Kelly,
Fundamental Rights
in
the
Irish
Law and Constitution
(2nd ed.
1967),
145-149.
1
omit any reference to powers conferred
by
statute in either the
Republic
of
Ireland or Northern Ireland.
3
Williams,
“
Arrest for Breach
of
the Peace
”
[1954] Crim.L.R.
578.
4
Ibid.
See also Brownlie,
The
Law Relating to Public Order
(1968).
3-6.
587
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