[JuniperMesos]

> Is a lone individual, or even a whole room, clapping a speech, disrupting?

Yeah, if the presider of the meeting asks people not to do that in order to get through more comments.

> What law has the individual broken by clapping or speaking? Councillors do not make law by speaking. They should get a court order if someone is being persistently disruptive, not use bully boy police intimidation.

> Special interest groups do indeed have private police forces in the US, that routinely misuse the wide powers available.

The people who dragged him out looked like the normal town police enforcing order at a public meeting in a normal way. This is the most basic function of police - or equivalently, anyone who does this job is doing policing, regardless of whether they're a uniformed official or just the physically biggest three guys in town.

[angry_octet]

You are confusing 'enforcing order' with anti democratic supression of speech. A few claps is not disorderly behaviour. There is no conceivable way that the clapping delayed proceedings; in fact, the supression of speech activities took far more time.