“After last year’s issues with aggressive hate groups during the rally, we applied for and received a Downtown Program Fund grant from the City of Eugene to support the event with fencing, gated entry and the ability to better control an environment where tensions can quickly escalate. Our intention was to host a street fair with stage programming, including activist speakers and entertainment,” the Eugene Pride Team said in a statement.
“Pride was told on Monday by a liaison with [the Eugene Police Department] that should we not file a parade permit, EPD may not direct resources to support the march, and that if anything happened, it would be on us. They stated that any of our volunteers that were in the street could be viewed by EPD as engaging in disorderly conduct. This, despite the fact that EPD has provided traffic control for at least four unpermitted marches in Eugene this year, including a Charlie Kirk rally and march.”
I’ve seen a couple of reasons being thrown around - one being that a parade permit requires general liability insurance for at least 2mil. The other is that Pride is a protest and one doesn’t need to permit a protest. And of course the double standard that the police will provide protection for other parades without permits.
And arrests for the Pride Parade.
Thanks, those make sense. Systemic injustice hiding in ‘equal treatment’ where police wouldn’t officially guarantee security at Kirk’s march but there wasn’t the same risk of counter-march agitators. Guess these days it makes sense to tiptoe, hopefully not for too long