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Since it’s public property, and a public occasion, I would naturally expect and understand that the civic authorities and their agents have the right to set and enforce standards of behavior in that time and place.

Behavior was never the issue, except for Cheeks’ illegal threat of falsified trespassing charges. Cheeks should have been placed under Citizen’s Arrest, tried, and fried for that violation alone.

Further, Cheeks admitted that the *CONTENT* of the poster, a silly picture, was his reason for picking out that one single poster for government censorship.

Regulating behavior is what good cops do.

Regulating content is what bad cops do.

Public property means PUBLIC and so is “owned” by the people. If there is on the books a statute prohibiting hand held signs in the area which I think would be unconstitutional anyway, that is one thing but I rather doubt that was the case since there were other signs this moron cop wannabe ignored.

What should happen (but won’t) is the person who was forced to take down his sign should file a suit against the cop wannabe if only to force him to court and to incur any expense associated with going to court. His employer should also be bombarded with calls demanding the fool get bounced (I called, had to leave a message)

Since it’s public property, and a public occasion, I would naturally expect and understand that the civic authorities and their agents have the right to set and enforce standards of behavior in that time and place.

Then you "naturally expect and understand" things exactly backwards. It's precisely BECAUSE this was a public political event that Cheeks was dead wrong. In the U.S., it's private property and private events in which the hosts may control political expression based on their own preference.

Secondly, it was not "behavior" that the rent-a-cop took issue with. Cheeks was selectively "enforcing" an arbitrary standard of his own making on the spot. His own words reveal he was applying his own standards, his own rules, and his own illegal tactics.

And you defend this guy? The only possible criterion on which to cut the guy any slack whatsoever would be to attribute his behavior to ignorance of the Constitution and the law rather than disdain for it. So which one of those excuses applies to you?