Saw this at the bank the other day, always wondered what the rationale was for loitering laws. I recall a woman being arrested once when she just parked her car in front of the business in question (a computer shop where a lot of us geeks always hung out at) and sat in the car for several hours until the cops were called. Anyone know?
In this specific instance, I would imagine that the shop was concerned that she was casing the joint for a future robbery.
In New York, “loitering” is defined as “wandering or standing with the purpose of begging,” its not just hanging around.
Some things are just malum prohibitum as the Romans used to say… bad because they are prohibited, as opposed to bad in themselves (malum in se).
It is illegal because laws were passed making it illegal. The laws were passed because people in general find it creepy and annoying to have some people just hanging about for hours.
Along the lines of my Latinate colleague, some things are bad because they lead to worse things and it’s advantageous to society to stop them before they do.
it’s a “Convenience law”–something the police can use as a convenient excuse to get rid of a person who they don’t want hanging around. It was originally designed, I think, in the 1930’s as a way to get rid of hobos hanging around railroad yards, (or blacks in southern towns)
Although this wiki article gives examples of more recently passed loitering laws, aimed at inner-city gangs.
Anecdotal evidence:
When I was in high school (hippie era, 1968) there was a city park that was used by teenagers for hanging out --and smoking marijuana. The local residents complained, so one sunny afternoon the police swept down on the park and arrested everybody there( who had long hair and jeans) on charges of “loitering”.
Well, umm, what’s a park for if you can’t sit on the benches with your friends and hang around?
A lawyer friend told me it was just a convenience law–they took everybody downtown, made their parents come pick them up, and then dropped the charges.
Then he said, yes, it is subject to abuse, but most of the time the police use the law against winos or guys standing around a playground with their zipper open, and as a liberal civil rights lawyer he didn’t object.
Loitering laws have also been held UnConstitutional. YMMV, IANAL.
http://www.ndsn.org/summer99/courts3.html
*On June 10, in a 6-to-3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Chicago anti-loitering law that allowed police to arrest persons who look like gang members and loiter on city streets (Chicago v. Morales, No. 97-1121 (1999)) (David G. Savage, “Supreme Court Rejects Ban on Gang Loitering,” Los Angeles Times, June 11, 1999, p. A3; Tony Mauro, “Court kills Chicago anti-gang law,” USA Today, June 11, 1999).
Chicago’s 1992 anti-gang ordinance allowed police to arrest persons who “remain in any one place with no apparent purpose” in the presence of a suspected gang member and who then fail to disperse satisfactorily when warned by police. Under the law, the city could arrest and win convictions even if they did not prove criminal behavior, criminal intent, or previous criminal activity by the person accused of loitering. Before lower courts found the law unconstitutional in 1995, Chicago police issued 89,000 dispersal orders under the ordinance and made 42,000 arrests. The majority of people arrested were black or Latino.
Writing for the majority, Justice John Paul Stevens said, “The freedom to loiter for innocent purposes is part of the liberty” protected by the U.S. Constitution. People in Chicago who stop to “engage in idle conversation or simply enjoy a cool breeze on a warm evening” should not be subject to police commands, said Stevens, joined in full by Justices David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
In separate opinions, three other justices joined the majority but rejected the idea that loitering is a constitutional right. Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and Stephen Breyer rejected the Chicago ordinance because it did not focus on specific criminal conduct. Justice O’Connor suggested that Chicago lawmakers should redraft their anti-gang laws to make it illegal to loiter in order to “establish control over identifiable areas or to intimidate others from entering those areas.”
Justice O’Connor’s opinion “gives states and local governments, for the first time, a legal avenue to address the terrible problems that communities face when gangs take over the public ways,” said Brian Crowe, corporation counsel for the City of Chicago. *
*The state penal code holds that a person is loitering if he “remains or wanders about in a public place for the purpose of begging,” but in a ruling that applied specifically to New York City enforcement, the provision was ruled unconstitutional in 1992 by a federal District Court.
Despite that ruling, more than 2,300 people have been arrested statewide for violating it over the last decade, including 442 in 2006. *
*CHICAGO – The American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois and the Cook County Public Defender’s office praised today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in City of Chicago v. Jesus Morales, et. al., striking down as unconstitutional Chicago’s “anti-gang loitering” ordinance, as a meaningful victory for young men of color in Chicago and across the nation.
“We are grateful that the Justices of the Supreme Court understand what escaped the political leaders of Chicago: namely, that it is not a criminal activity simply to be a young man of color gathered with friends on the streets of Chicago,” said Harvey Grossman, Legal Director of the ACLU of Illinois.*
http://www.prisonactivist.org/copwatch/pubs/nov93/loitrlaw.htm
http://santacruz.indymedia.org/mod/comments/display/24045/index.php
Loitering laws were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court because the court ruled, you can’t arrest someone for simply being in one place too long.
http://www.libertarianrock.com/topics/curfew/palmdale_curfew_victory.html
*Superior Court Judge Chesley N. McKay released a preliminary ruling that Palmdale’s curfew is unconstitutional. …Barrera argued that the words “loiter, idle, wander, stroll or aimlessly drive” are unconstitutionally vague. “The ordinance also infringes on freedom of speech and freedom of association,” he wrote.
Judge McKay’s finding was based on a decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that ruled a similarly worded San Diego curfew unconstitutional. *
http://www.ohiou.edu/~orle/new/bm.htm
*To begin, a well-established element of the guarantees of due process requires that the proscriptions of a criminal statute be clearly defined. Haywood, 118 Ill. 2d at 269, citing Grayned v. City of Rockford, 408 U.S. 104, 108, 33 L Ed. 2d 222, 227, 92 S. Ct. 2298, 2298-99 (1972). To avoid the vagueness doctrine, a criminal statute must meet two standards. The first, it must be sufficiently definite so that it gives a person “of ordinary intelligence” the opportunity to distinguish between lawful and unlawful conduct. And second, the statute must define the criminal offense in a way that it does not encourage discriminatory enforcement. Kolender, 461 U.S. at 357-58, 75 L. Ed. 2d at 909, 103 S. Ct. at 1858…A second constitutionally guaranteed right violated by the Chicago Gang Law is the right to free movement in any public place or forum. This right includes, “going to, remaining in and leaving at one’s own pleasure, such public places and forums as parks, plazas, streets, sidewalks, and the myriad other public spaces in and around one’s neighborhood. Indeed, the free use of such places is, for many, an integral and indispensable part of daily urban life.”[6] In 1972, the Supreme Court found that loitering laws were unconstitutional and prohibited their enforcement.[7]
http://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/crimreport/constitutional.html
*Measures
Another tool that cities have used to target people who live outside and on the streets are laws that prohibit loitering. Due to the broad scope of prohibited behavior under loitering laws, cities have used these to target homeless people in public spaces. Fortunately, cities have found these laws less useful, as the Supreme Court has overturned several loitering laws for being unconstitutionally vague.
In several cases, the Supreme Court has found vagrancy and loitering ordinances unconstitutional due to vagueness, in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. A statute is unconstitutionally vague if it does not give a person notice of prohibited conduct and encourages arbitrary police enforcement. Since many loitering laws have similarly broad and vague language, homeless persons and advocates have a strong argument that such laws violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.*
There’s been a bunch of controversy here in Baltimore over the past couple of years regarding the city police force’s practice of sweeping up dozens of people at a time, and thousands over the course of a few years, in low-level “quality of life” arrests, many of which were merely for “loitering.”
Even after the city’s highest ranking criminal prosecutor, State’s Attorney Patricia Jessamy, stated outright at a legislative hearing that many of the arrests were in violation of the Constitution, the cops have continued to pick people up on slim or no pretext.
In August 2005, almost 9,000 people were taken to central booking in Baltimore. Of those, 1882 cases:
And from an earlier story:
Broad brush there mate.
Actually, if you bothered following the link provided in chappachula’s post, you’d get to the Wikipedia entry for “loitering,” which notes that vagrancy laws were used in the South to control blacks. This claim cites volume 37 of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, where you’ll find an article entitled Regulating Race: Asian Exclusion and the Administrative State (pdf). That article notes that “a plurality” of loitering and vagrancy laws in Ameirca “relied on racist aspects of the legal history of loitering,” and the article in turn cites 527 U.S. 41 City of Chicago v. Morales et al., which says:
Kerber’s book, which i have here in my office, discusses the racial, discusses the race and gender aspects of vagrancy and loitering laws, especially in the South, and she notes:
So, unless you’ve got something to refute what chappachula said, might i suggest you take your knee out of your mouth. No-one said that all Southern towns did this; all chappachula noted was that loitering and vagrancy laws were convenience laws, and that one way they could be used was to regulate blacks in Southern towns.
Loitering laws were an excellent way to make Depression-era jobless feel unwelcome and get them out of town before they had a chance to take jobs from locals.
I’m reminded of a passage from Woody Allen, about a career criminal getting his start:
“His first arrest was for loitering. He loitered for five years until he realized it was not the kind of crime that brought in any money.”
Well, how about reality? I and all my relatives have lived in small Southern towns forever and have only witnessed this sort of persecution on TV and cheesy movies. Believe it or not, we didn’t lynch all black people or run them out of town or burn crosses on their lawns. You might be surprised to learn that no town I or any of my relatives ever lived in even had the supposedly ubiquitous separate fountains or bathrooms. The intelligentsia you cited have perpetuated these stereotypes for sometime, and they are just that, stereotypes. I grew up in a multicultural neighborhood, which included several mixed marriages on my street, and my aunt married a person of color in the 50s. All are alive and well, and were never firebombed or even rousted. Racism existed, throughout the country, but not everyone in the south was a fucking klansman, hence my “broad brush” comment.
While that may be a good point today, Operation Ripper, I doubt you were around in 1865, or even during the period from 1890 to 1910.
“Loitering” is a law of convenience for cops, so they can arrest whomever they want.
You have the most amazing ability to miss the point. Kudos. It must take some real effort on your part to be so oblivious to the actual argument that’s being made here, rather than the paranoid fantasy you’ve constructed in your mind.
No kudos to you though. From a distant time and place, you are telling me the sky is green down here because other people have told you so. I’m here, and I’ve been here a while, and it is and has been blue, and I’ve told you it is and has been, but you persist in trying to convince me that it is and has been green, because some guys told you so. No kudos to you mate.
No.
I’m simply saying that your own personal experience might not be reflective of what was happening in some other parts of the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Were you, for example, in Alabama in 1865 when the state broadened its vagrancy code? Did you see the results of that legislation? Were you alive between 1890 and 1910 when other former Confederate states adopted new vagrancy laws?
Sort of a WAG but I could imagine loitering could be harmful to businesses since it may scare off customers. For example, if you saw a bunch of shady looking kids in front of your local 7-11, maybe you would rather just go without that smoothie you’ve been craving.
Littering as well, I would guess. Cigaretter butts and empty beverage containers getting left all over the place.
About six months ago, there were a couple homeless camped out on the front lawn of the apartment building I live in. The pooped and pissed under the stairwell.
Sure and opening a competing business across the street could also cost a store a lot of business. Shall we make that illegal too?
Doesn’t the fact that SCOTUS has struck down many of these laws make dudes wonder? And the fact that even after a high Court has ruled a law UnConstitutional, the Police continue to arrest dudes under that law?
Loitering laws are bad.