Peaceful Protest or Violent Radicals?

Radly Balko has an excellent column over at Reason.com. Please read the whole thing...here's an except that makes an great point.

It can’t be easy to both keep order and protect civil liberties at such events. But that doesn’t mean police and city officials shouldn’t be expected to try. Yes, some protesters damaged some property at the G-20 summit, although there wasn’t much of that this time around. But the presence of a few unruly demonstrators doesn’t give the police carte blanche to crack down on every young person in the general vicinity, nor should it give the city free rein to suppress all public protest. It’s unfortunate that when the global press and the leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies came to Pittsburgh, the images that emerged were not of a society that values free expression and constitutional rights but of one willing to grant police powers normally seen in authoritarian states.

At what point does Freedom of Speech end? At what point does a police prescence give them the right to squash any and all public dissent? Mr. Balko brings up some very troubling points from a 1st Amendment point of view...