Failure to notify is not, in itself, sufficient reason to break up a protest if it is peaceful and unarmed. - Jane Duncan

It is the easier route for universities to say and do “security” in response to growing campus unrest. But it is also the more simplistic road. There is enough scholarship to show that this road leads nowhere. University actors must do more to break with this self-fulfilling prophecy.

If netizens want to live free from fear and want, offline and on, then they will not achieve this by handing decision-making about the internet to increasingly secretive, unaccountable governments. Trading freedom for security is no security at all.

Municipal decision-making sets a framework for police actions — in that prohibited protests are more likely to trigger police actions than ones that aren’t — but the police can exercise discretion in how they respond to such collective action.