Judge Issues Restraining Order for Mall Against BLM – Protest Going Forward Anyway

Hennepin County Judge Karen Janisch on Tuesday approved the nation’s largest mall’s request for a temporary restraining order barring Black Lives Matter protest organizers from showing up there Wednesday. One of those is the concept that all lives matter, regardless of skin color.

Activists are planning a Black Lives Matter demonstration that they say could bring hundreds of protesters to the Mall of America on the day before Christmas Eve.

While the judge did bar three of the group’s alleged leaders from attending, Black Lives Matter leaders quickly responded by saying the protest would go on as planned. He said he sympathizes with protesters’ concerns, but he stressed that the mall is private property.

Last year’s protest was the last Saturday before Christmas and Wednesday’s is set for the last full shopping day before the holiday.

The demonstration then was aimed at calling attention to the death of Michael Brown, shot by a Ferguson, Mo., police officer.

On Tuesday afternoon, Janisch cited existing precedent that the mall is private property and that it may exercise its “rights of possession and control over their private property to exclude from their private property political demonstrators”. This week they asked a judge to bar the group, its leaders and others from protesting and require it to delete social media posts advertising the demonstration. The disruption caused several stores to temporarily close and dozens of arrests were made. According to the police report, Clark was resisting arrest – but witnesses have said that he was under restraint and in handcuffs when he was shot.

In Monday’s hearing, mall attorney Susan Gaertner said she sought the court order because of the group’s choice of forum, not the content of its message.

Protest organizers want a special prosecutor to be appointed in Clark’s death rather than have a grand jury decide whether to charge the officers involved in his death. The purported draft restraining order, posted on the Black Lives Matter Minneapolis Facebook page, would have prohibited the defendants from “engaging in any demonstration on MOA Premises without the express, written permission of Mall of America”. Deputy Bloomington Police Chief Denis Otterness declined to discuss any additional security measures the mall may put in place Wednesday.