How to use this
Most of what a street evangelist wants to do is squarely protected. The trouble almost never comes from the message. It comes from the sidewalk, the volume, and the refusal to move.
That is the pattern across nearly every case in this article. Courts protect preaching, tracts, and signs in public places with remarkable consistency. What gets people arrested is blocking a doorway, standing in a roadway, or declining a lawful order. Put another way: the exposure in nearly every reported case attached to conduct, not content. That is worth knowing whichever risks you decide to take, because it tells you which ones are actually load-bearing.
This article states the general rules. Its companion applies them to one particular event. Both are written for people who intend to obey the law and want to know exactly where its edges are.
What this document does and does not do
It sets out what the law protects, what it permits government to restrict, and what the documented consequences have actually been when people pressed the edges. It does not tell you which risks to accept. Believers have gone to jail for street preaching on purpose and been vindicated later; others have judged a particular tactic not worth the cost on a particular day. Both are legitimate calls, and neither is a legal question.
Every case, statute, and ordinance links to a primary source — the court’s own opinion, the legislature’s own text. Where a source could not be independently confirmed, it carries an unverified tag. Nothing here asks you to take a claim on trust.
The forum map
Almost every question in this article resolves to one prior question: what kind of government property am I standing on? The Supreme Court laid out the categories in Perry Education Ass’n v. Perry Local Educators’ Ass’n, 460 U.S. 37 (1983).
| Forum | Examples | What government may do |
|---|---|---|
| Traditional public forum | Streets, sidewalks, public parks. Held in trust for assembly and debate since time out of mind. | Content-neutral time, place, and manner rules only, narrowly tailored, leaving ample alternative channels. Content-based rules face strict scrutiny. |
| Designated public forum | Property government has deliberately opened to expressive use. | Same standard as a traditional forum, for as long as it stays open. |
| Limited public forum | Opened for certain speakers or subjects — a campus space for student groups, a school flyer program. | Restrictions must be reasonable and viewpoint-neutral. |
| Nonpublic forum | Government workplaces, internal mail systems, secure areas. | Broad discretion, still bounded by viewpoint neutrality. |
The one rule worth memorizing
A public street does not stop being a public forum because it has been closed for an event. A permit gives an organizer use of the street. It does not convert public property into private property, and it does not hand anyone the power to decide which messages are welcome there. Section 06 works this through.
Two further points that come up constantly. First, offensive speech in a public forum is still protected — Snyder v. Phelps, 562 U.S. 443 (2011) protected picketing far uglier than anything a gospel witness would attempt. Second, religious proselytizing has been protected since Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296 (1940), which reversed a breach-of-peace conviction against door-to-door evangelists.
Tracts and literature
Handing a willing person a piece of paper is about as protected as speech gets. The case law on this is old, deep, and one-sided.
- Lovell v. City of Griffin, 303 U.S. 444 (1938) — a city required written permission before distributing “literature of any kind.” Struck down. You cannot be made to ask permission to hand out a tract.
- Schneider v. State, 308 U.S. 147 (1939) — leafleting bans justified by littering concerns fail. The remedy for litter is to punish the litterer.
- Watchtower Bible & Tract Society v. Village of Stratton, 536 U.S. 150 (2002) — a permit requirement for door-to-door religious canvassing struck down. The Court was blunt about the burden a registration scheme places on spontaneous, anonymous, and religious speech.
The modern festival case is the one to know:
Saieg v. City of Dearborn, 641 F.3d 727 (6th Cir. 2011)Read the opinion →
A Christian evangelist to Muslims wanted to walk the sidewalks of the Arab International Festival handing out literature. The city confined him and forbade roving distribution. The Sixth Circuit struck the restriction down as not narrowly tailored, holding that a leafleter may leaflet from any street or sidewalk that remains open for typical, non-festival pedestrian traffic.
The reasoning matters as much as the result: the city had left the same sidewalks open to pedestrians and to sidewalk vendors, whose activity obstructs flow more than a walking leafleter does. A crowd-control justification collapses when the government tolerates worse obstruction from people it likes.
Bays v. City of Fairborn, 668 F.3d 814 (6th Cir. 2012)Read the opinion →
Christian sign-carriers and tract-distributors at the Sweet Corn Festival. The court found the city’s solicitation policy content-neutral but not narrowly tailored, reversed, and directed that a preliminary injunction issue. Content neutrality is not a safe harbor for a badly drawn rule.
The line that matters: paper and money are different
Courts treat free distribution and the solicitation of funds very differently. Handing out tracts is core protected expression. Asking for money — a bucket, a jar, a QR code, a sale — brings you inside solicitation and peddling rules that are far easier for a city to enforce, and inside the category Heffron permits a government to confine to booths.
That is a real trade rather than a rule. Accepting donations may be worth it for some ministries; what it costs is the strongest version of the legal position described above. What it does not do is leave that position untouched — so it is worth deciding deliberately, in advance, rather than discovering the consequence during an interaction with an officer.
Signs you carry
Sign ordinances regulate signs that are placed — erected, affixed, painted on, attached to a structure or vehicle, staked in the ground. A sign held in your hands generally is not addressed by them at all. That is not usually because a code contains a hand-held exemption; it is because a carried sign does not fall within any regulated category.
Check your own city’s code before relying on this. The absence of regulation is an inference from a code’s structure, not a quotable exemption clause. Read the definitions section and see whether “sign” is defined in terms of placement.
What sign codes do reliably prohibit is putting a sign in the public right-of-way — staked in a median, zip-tied to a pole, leaned against a hydrant. That prohibition is content-neutral and routinely enforced. Carry your signs; do not plant them.
Since Reed v. Town of Gilbert, 576 U.S. 155 (2015), a sign rule that treats messages differently based on what they say is content-based and faces strict scrutiny. If an official tells you your sign is a problem but an identically sized commercial or event sign is not, Reed is the case to name. Many municipal codes also carry a “noncommercial copy” clause allowing a noncommercial message wherever any sign is permitted — worth locating in your own code.
Your voice, and amplifying it
Unamplified preaching in a public forum is protected. Amplification is where most street ministries actually get cited.
Noise rules are the classic content-neutral time, place, and manner restriction, and Ward v. Rock Against Racism, 491 U.S. 781 (1989) upheld sound-volume regulation squarely. A city may control how loud you are as long as it does not care what you are saying.
Most modern noise ordinances use one of two tests. Know which one governs where you stand:
| Standard | How it works | What it means in practice |
|---|---|---|
| Plainly audible at a set distance | Unlawful if an officer can plainly hear the amplified sound from, say, fifty feet. | No meter needed. An officer’s ear is the instrument. A bullhorn almost always fails this test; a small personal amplifier may or may not. |
| Decibel limit | A numeric cap, often varying by zone and time of day. | Requires a calibrated meter and a trained operator, so it is enforced less often but is harder to argue with. |
The exemption almost never covers you
Noise ordinances routinely exempt permitted special events. Read that exemption carefully: it runs to the permit holder. The festival stage may be far louder than anything you could lawfully produce, and that asymmetry feels unjust, but it is not a defense. The organizer holds a permit. You do not.
The asymmetry does have evidentiary value: selective enforcement — tolerating loud amplification an official likes while citing amplification he doesn’t — is evidence of the content discrimination Reed condemns. That value is realized later, in a filing. It rarely persuades the officer holding the citation book.
On content: the line between protected preaching and unprotected speech is much further out than most people assume. Incitement is unprotected only where speech is directed to, and likely to produce, imminent lawless action — Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969). Disorderly-conduct statutes that reach “abusive language” generally require words plainly likely to provoke immediate violence. Strong preaching, hard words, and unwelcome truth are not disorderly conduct. Personally targeted abuse of an individual is where that changes.
Festivals on closed public streets
This is the recurring scenario: a city closes several blocks and issues a permit to a private organizer. Someone tells you the organizer runs this street now and you need to leave. Here is the actual law.
The cases that help you
Startzell v. City of Philadelphia, 533 F.3d 183 (3d Cir. 2008)Read the opinion →
Christian evangelists at OutFest, a permitted street festival. The Third Circuit expressly rejected the organizer’s claim that holding a city permit empowered it to exclude people expressing contrary messages. That is the holding to carry in your pocket.
But read the rest honestly: the evangelists lost. Police directed them to move to avoid blocking a permitted stage, they refused, and they were arrested. The court upheld the content-neutral instructions and the arrests that followed the refusal. Your right to be there survived. Your right to disobey an officer did not.
Saieg and Bays, above, both came out of festivals and both went for the Christian speaker. Berger v. City of Seattle, 569 F.3d 1029 (9th Cir. 2009) (en banc) struck down a registration scheme applied to individual speakers, observing that nearly every circuit to consider the question has refused to uphold registration requirements aimed at individuals or small groups in a public forum.
The cases that will be used against you
Heffron v. ISKCON, 452 U.S. 640 (1981)Read the opinion →
The Minnesota State Fair confined the sale and distribution of literature and the solicitation of funds to rented booths. The Supreme Court upheld the rule, given the extraordinary crowd density of an enclosed, paid-admission fairground.
Know its limits. Heffron is about booth confinement for sales and solicitation on a controlled fairground. It did not authorize banning roving conversation everywhere, and Saieg distinguished it precisely because Dearborn kept its public sidewalks open. The closer a venue is to an ordinary open street, the weaker the Heffron analogy. Expect it to be cited at you anyway.
Hurley v. Irish-American GLIB, 515 U.S. 557 (1995) protects a private parade organizer’s right to control the message of its own expressive unit. Organizers cite it to exclude outside messages. It does not fit: Hurley is about being forced to include someone in your parade, not about a veto over independent speakers on the surrounding public sidewalks.
Bloedorn v. Grube, 631 F.3d 1218 (11th Cir. 2011) is the cautionary one. An itinerant evangelist lost: the Eleventh Circuit affirmed denial of an injunction, treating a university’s general campus as a limited or nonpublic forum and analyzing its designated “free speech area” under deferential standards. Campuses are not streets.
The synthesis
At a permitted street festival, a city and an organizer may enforce genuinely content-neutral crowd management: keep lanes clear, don’t block booths or the stage, keep sales and table-based distribution inside rented booth space, obey posted amplification limits.
They may not exclude you from a public street because of your message, and they may not confine peaceful leafleting and preaching to a “protest zone” without a valid, narrowly tailored, discretion-limiting written policy that actually exists on paper.
Permits with no standards
A permission scheme that contains nothing but official discretion is unconstitutional on its face, and you can challenge it without ever applying.
- City of Lakewood v. Plain Dealer, 486 U.S. 750 (1988) — standardless licensing is facially invalid, and a speaker need not submit to an unconstitutional permit process in order to contest it.
- Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement, 505 U.S. 123 (1992) — no unbridled administrative discretion, and audience hostility cannot be the basis for a permitting decision. That second half is the heckler’s-veto rule, and it matters enormously for anyone whose message offends.
- Child Evangelism Fellowship v. Montgomery County Public Schools, 457 F.3d 376 (4th Cir. 2006) — binding in North Carolina. A school district rewrote its flyer policy to claim broad discretion after losing an earlier round. The Fourth Circuit held that even in a limited or nonpublic forum, a policy permitting officials to deny access for any reason, or lacking criteria sufficient to prevent viewpoint discrimination, generally will not survive. The plaintiff was an evangelical ministry distributing religious literature. It won.
What a defective policy does and does not get you
A standardless scheme is powerful leverage if you are denied, and it can be attacked in court without applying. What it does not do is suspend enforcement in the moment. Defying an unwritten rule on the day produces a citation and a ban; the ruling that vindicates you, if it comes, comes months later and in a different building.
Some speakers accept that sequence on purpose, and a facial challenge needs someone willing to be the plaintiff. The point is that the two things are separable: the gap in their policy is an argument, and whether you want to be the person who tests it is a decision about what you are prepared to absorb.
Graphic imagery: what actually happens
This section exists because the fear and the evidence do not match. People assume displaying graphic abortion images near children is a fast route to prosecution. The documented record says otherwise — but it also says the risk is real, just of a different kind.
The closest case on the facts
Center for Bio-Ethical Reform v. L.A. County Sheriff’s Dept., 533 F.3d 780 (9th Cir. 2008)Read the opinion →
The facts are about as bad as this gets. In March 2003 a truck carrying enlarged photographs of aborted fetuses circled a middle school as students arrived. School officials reported children stopping and staring, some standing in the street, girls crying, and a group of boys planning to throw rocks at the truck. Deputies stopped both vehicles, detained the drivers, searched a vehicle, invoked a state statute about disrupting a school, and ordered them to leave.
No one was arrested. No one was charged. The Ninth Circuit held the deputies violated the demonstrators’ First Amendment rights, though the individuals received qualified immunity because the law was not yet clearly established. The 2011 amended opinion put it plainly: misapplying a statute is not a significant governmental interest.
The court also stated there is no precedent for a minors exception to the rule against banning speech because of how listeners react to its content.
The one that went the other way
Saint John’s Church in the Wilderness v. Scott (Colo. App. 2008 & 2012)2008 opinion →
Palm Sunday 2005, Denver. Demonstrators on the public sidewalk across from an Episcopal church during an outdoor procession, displaying three-by-four-and-a-half-foot posters of mutilated fetuses. The trial court found roughly two hundred children in the procession were exposed, and that the posters were highly disturbing to adults and children because of their gruesomeness, apart from any message intended to be conveyed.
Note the vehicle: the church sued in private nuisance. This was a civil suit, not a prosecution. The Colorado Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment, vacated the injunction in part, and remanded; on the second appeal in 2012 it reviewed the modified injunction’s buffer zones and noise restrictions, affirming in part and vacating in part.
The U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari on June 10, 2013 without reaching the merits. The question presented framed this entire section: whether government may restrict the display of gruesome material within religious and moral advocacy in a traditional public forum in order to protect the sensibilities of children.
Why it matters less than it appears: a civil injunction, tied to one recurring location and one congregation, from a state intermediate appellate court, never reviewed on the merits. It is not criminal precedent and it binds no one outside Colorado.
Charges that get filed, and dropped
Gwinnett County, Georgia — November 2007News report →
The day after Thanksgiving, a driver of an Operation Rescue “Truth Truck” was arrested near a shopping mall for disorderly conduct after refusing to remove graphic banners. Police called the images obscene and vulgar, impounded the truck, and removed the banners.
“I have reviewed the evidence and law in this case and concluded that the physical display of the images in question — as shocking and offensive as they are — does not constitute ‘obscene and vulgar or profane language’ as specifically prohibited by this statute.”
The Gwinnett County Solicitor, dismissing the charge
Net result: one arrest, one impoundment, one dismissal, no conviction.
Compare United States v. Marcavage, 609 F.3d 264 (3d Cir. 2010), where an anti-abortion demonstrator at the Liberty Bell had both convictions vacated — the permit violation because the verbal permit condition was invalid, the interference conviction because it was obtained in violation of the First Amendment.
What you are actually risking
| Type of exposure | Realistic likelihood | Documented basis |
|---|---|---|
| Criminal conviction for the imagery itself | Very low. No appellate decision found sustaining one. | Gwinnett dismissal; Marcavage vacatur; harmful-to-minors statutes limited to sexual content |
| Arrest or citation — disorderly conduct, obstruction, failure to disperse | Low to moderate. Usually dismissed. | Gwinnett County (2007) |
| Police order to move or take the signs down | Moderate to high. This is the normal outcome. | CBR v. L.A. County; Gwinnett impoundment |
| Civil injunction or nuisance suit | Low but genuinely real in recurring, child-focused settings | Saint John’s Church v. Scott |
| Hostile crowd, assault, or interference | High at any well-attended event | Campus displays routinely draw confrontation; interferers are the ones typically arrested |
The honest trade-off
Graphic imagery does not meaningfully raise your risk of conviction. It substantially raises the odds of a confrontation, a police order, an ejection attempt, a civil suit, and a day defined by the fight rather than the gospel.
That is a ministry judgment as much as a legal one, and this article will not make it for you. Its only contribution is the actual numbers rather than the imagined ones. Those who use this tactic have generally judged the confrontation itself to be part of the point; those who don’t have generally judged the same confrontation to obscure it. The law does not settle that argument, and the documented record does not either.
What the record does show is which preparations change the outcome: counsel reachable by phone, a designated recorder, and a decision made in advance about how the group will respond to an order to take the display down. The demonstrators who won their cases had all three.
One thing we could not find: a U.S. state statute that specifically regulates graphic or gruesome non-sexual imagery displays as such. Regulation has instead come through content-neutral time-place-manner rules, private nuisance injunctions, and misapplied harmful-to-minors statutes. Treat this as “none found” rather than “none exists.”
The “harmful to minors” question
Answered plainly: these statutes reach sexual material. They do not reach gore, and no reported case has made one stick against abortion photographs.
The reason is structural. “Harmful to minors” is a variable-obscenity doctrine, and obscenity law is about sex.
- Ginsberg v. New York, 390 U.S. 629 (1968) upheld a harmful-to-minors statute for sexual material. The doctrine adjusts the definition of obscenity as applied to minors. It does not create a general power to shield children from upsetting content.
- Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973) supplies the obscenity test these statutes are built on — and it is a test about sexual conduct.
- Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Ass’n, 564 U.S. 786 (2011) squarely refused to extend Ginsberg to violence, striking California’s violent-video-game law. Graphic abortion images are violent, not sexual.
North Carolina settles it on the text
N.C. Gen. Stat. § 14-190.13 defines “harmful to minors” as the quality of material or performance “that depicts sexually explicit nudity or sexual activity” and that meets a Miller-style test as applied to minors. That definition governs both § 14-190.14 (displaying) and § 14-190.15 (disseminating).
Graphic abortion photographs contain no sexually explicit nudity and no sexual activity. They fall outside the statute as a matter of law. A North Carolina officer or prosecutor cannot lawfully use these provisions against non-sexual gruesome imagery. Check your own state’s definitional section — most are written the same way.
The documented instance of a harmful-to-minors theory actually being invoked against this imagery is the L.A. County sheriff’s stop in CBR — and the Ninth Circuit called it a misapplication of the statute. The theory has been attempted. It has not been sustained.
Buffer zones and captive audiences
The captive-audience doctrine lets government shield people who genuinely cannot look away. It has succeeded around homes and clinics; it has generally failed as a way to shield passersby on an open sidewalk.
- Frisby v. Schultz, 487 U.S. 474 (1988) — focused residential picketing at a single home may be banned. The home is the paradigm captive setting.
- Madsen v. Women’s Health Center, 512 U.S. 753 (1994) — injunctive buffer zones around a clinic, upheld in part.
- Hill v. Colorado, 530 U.S. 703 (2000) — a floating no-approach bubble near health facilities, upheld at the time.
- McCullen v. Coakley, 573 U.S. 464 (2014) — a fixed 35-foot clinic buffer struck down as insufficiently tailored. McCullen materially narrowed this line and is the case to cite when a buffer is proposed.
A pedestrian walking down a public street is not captive in the constitutional sense. That is why the minors-based content exception failed in CBR.
The federal clinic statute
The FACE Act, 18 U.S.C. § 248, reaches force, threats of force, and physical obstruction — not speech. Note that § 248(a)(2) protects places of religious worship on the same terms: it is unlawful to intentionally injure, intimidate, or interfere with a person exercising the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of worship, and “physical obstruction” includes making passage to or from such a place unreasonably difficult.
That provision cuts both ways. It protects your own gatherings from obstruction, and it exposes you to federal criminal liability if your activity obstructs someone else’s worship. Outreach near an outdoor service is the one setting where a federal statute sits alongside the state disorderly-conduct provision, which is worth knowing before you plan around one.
When an officer gives an order
This is the single most consequential paragraph in the article. Nearly every street evangelist who has gone to jail went because of what happened in the sixty seconds after an officer spoke.
In Startzell, the evangelists’ right to be at the festival was vindicated in principle and their arrests were upheld in fact, because they refused a lawful instruction to move. Refusing to leave after a dispersal order supplies probable cause under ordinary trespass and obstruction statutes, and the later dismissal of a charge does not make the arrest unlawful.
The fork, and where each branch goes
An officer’s order splits into two paths, and it is worth knowing both before you are standing in one.
- Complying, and saying so under protest. Ends the exposure immediately and preserves the underlying claim intact. This is what the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform did in section 08 — they left when told to, sued afterward, and the Ninth Circuit held the order unconstitutional.
- Refusing. Supplies probable cause for arrest under ordinary trespass and obstruction statutes. The arrest stands even if the charge is later dropped, and even if the order was itself unlawful. That is precisely what happened in Startzell: the evangelists were right about their right to be there and were convicted anyway.
People choose the second path deliberately and sometimes for good reason. What makes it costly is choosing it by accident, in the middle of an argument, without having decided in advance that this was the ground worth being arrested on.
Independent of which path you take, three things preserve your position at no cost: ask once what law or policy you are violating and get the officer’s name and badge number; record from a lawful vantage point, noting time, place, and witnesses; and designate a single person to handle official conversations while everyone else keeps working. Write it down the same night, while it is accurate.
A recent and widely misreported case
Olivier v. City of Brandon, 607 U.S. ___ (March 20, 2026)Slip opinion →
A street preacher was convicted of violating a city ordinance confining demonstrations to a designated protest area, then sued to stop future enforcement. The lower courts held his prior conviction barred the suit under Heck v. Humphrey.
The Supreme Court granted certiorari and ruled unanimously for the preacher on March 20, 2026, holding that a suit seeking purely prospective relief — an injunction against future enforcement — can proceed notwithstanding a prior conviction for violating that ordinance.
Read that carefully. This is a procedural ruling about who may sue, not a First Amendment ruling about protest zones. The constitutionality of Brandon’s ordinance was not decided and the case returned to the lower courts. Older summaries describing this as a denial of certiorari are out of date.
Its practical significance is real but narrow: being convicted once no longer forecloses a suit to stop the same rule from being enforced against you again.
The Fourth Circuit, for North Carolina readers
Most of the strongest festival cases above come from the Third, Sixth, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits. They are persuasive in North Carolina, not binding. Here is what actually binds.
Ross v. Early, 746 F.3d 546 (4th Cir. 2014)Read the opinion →
The one to be aware of, because it cuts against speakers. The Fourth Circuit upheld a Baltimore protocol confining leafleting to designated areas outside an arena as a content-neutral time, place, and manner restriction. The leafleter was arrested for disobeying repeated police orders.
Two qualifications matter. The court’s level of scrutiny rested on a stipulation by the parties. And the policy was real, written, and specific — a speaker could read it and know where to stand. In the companion case Lucero v. Early, 873 F.3d 466 (4th Cir. 2017), the Fourth Circuit vacated and remanded precisely because Ross’s stipulation was absent and the intervening decisions in McCullen and Reed required fresh analysis. no free full text located
The takeaway: a written, concrete, content-neutral designated-area policy may well survive in this circuit. An unwritten one, or one that is nothing but official discretion, is a different matter entirely — see Child Evangelism Fellowship in section 07.
Warren v. Fairfax County, 196 F.3d 186 (4th Cir. 1999) (en banc) held a grassy median at a county government center to be a traditional public forum and struck down a restriction limiting displays there. It is strong authority that public grounds keep their forum status and that access restrictions receive real scrutiny.
Stated plainly: we found no Fourth Circuit or North Carolina federal decision squarely addressing street preaching, leafleting at a festival, or graphic abortion imagery. The nearest authorities are Ross, Lucero, Warren, and Child Evangelism Fellowship. On the specific question of graphic imagery at a public event in North Carolina, there is no controlling precedent. Anyone who tells you otherwise should be asked for the citation.
North Carolina has no statewide clinic buffer-zone statute. The state constitutional guarantee is at N.C. Const. art. I, § 14: freedom of speech and of the press “are two of the great bulwarks of liberty and therefore shall never be restrained.”
Local rules by venue
The doctrine in this article is general. The rules that actually govern a given spot are local — a municipal noise ordinance, a campus demonstration policy, a county trespass statute. This section points to the three venues where the public-witness work is being planned, each with its own page carrying the maps, rules, guidance, and opportunities specific to that ground.
The general rules above apply everywhere. What changes venue to venue is which ordinance reaches your voice, which permit scheme reaches your presence, and which property line puts you on a public sidewalk instead of a limited forum. The venue pages work each of those out against the actual text of the local code or campus policy, with every provision linked to its primary source.
| Venue | Ground | What the local rule turns on |
|---|---|---|
| Raleigh — African American Cultural Festival | Closed public street, Fayetteville Street, Hargett to City Plaza | A permitted street festival on a public forum. The organizer runs the event; the city retains the street. Section 06 works through the doctrine; the field guide assigns eight named positions and states the risk at each. |
| Southern Pines — downtown Broad Street | Public sidewalks and Downtown Park, traditional public forum | Town Code § 90.037(A) expressly permits free hand-to-hand distribution of noncommercial handbills — a written exception in the code since 1982. § 90.081(B)(4) reaches “yelling, shouting” on a public sidewalk under an annoyance standard with no decibel figure, no distance test, and no hours limit. No amplified-sound permit exists outside the special-event process. |
| Sandhills Community College | Campus grounds (limited public forum) and the Airport Road public right-of-way (traditional public forum) | Board Policy 2.10 commits the College to establish time, place, and manner regulations; the only regulation ever published, Procedure 2.10.1, requires permission to use a “designated area” while designating no area, stating no criteria, and providing no appeal. The public sidewalk along Airport Road is a traditional public forum requiring no campus permission at all. |
How the general and the local fit together
Read this article for the doctrine. Read the venue page for the ground. The general rules don’t change — a public sidewalk is a traditional public forum in Southern Pines the same as it is in Raleigh — but the local ordinance or campus policy is what an officer actually invokes, and the local text is what you print and carry. Each venue page links back to the relevant section here; each section here links out to the venue it applies to.
One caution that holds across all three. In every documented case in this article, the arrest came from conduct after an order — refusing to move, blocking a lane, declining to leave — not from the message. The local rule tells you where the line is drawn on that particular ground. Whether you stand on it is a separate decision.