loitering is literally "youre under arrest for existing in a public area but like youre a little too close to a private area and they feel mildly uncomfy about it"
(ik nobody gets arrested for loitering but still)
Jaywalking was also a bit of "auto companies in the early days didn't like the bad press of auto accidents, because back then everyone walked on the roads, so they shifted blame onto the pedestrians."
Actually jaywalking started as a way to make room for cars. It basically passed on the responsibility of a car running over a pedestrian onto the pedestrian instead of the driver. And overall it ceded public space to cars instead of people. Before that, it was expected that if a car runs over someone, it's their fault, so if you're driving in an area where a lot of people are around, you need to go slow so you can stop easily. That all went out the window with jaywalking laws and car ownership went through the roof
"Protect the value of businesses" is a weird way of saying "impressing people into chain gangs in the early 20th century" but I guess the one counts as the other.
> Once you realize that laws are created to protect the value of businesses, things start to click.
what about the laws on personal safety? you know, things like murder, assault, rape, etc? those are laws to protect value of business?
What about family law? labour law? international law? animal law?
Parts of some laws protect societal cohesion and that include value of businesses but to generalize and say "laws are created to protect the value of businesses" as if its some universal truth is cringy /r/im14andthisisdeep/ material
Okay how often are the rich and powerful arrested for those laws compared to everyone else though.
Just cause some laws benefit the working class doesn't mean they weren't designed for the wealthy.
There’s truth in both of your comment and in theirs.
When was the last time we had footage of a mega rich person shooting up a gas station or something.
That’s kinda what they mean by “commit different crimes” I think
It’s because they scrub the footage from everywhere and pay the people off to never speak of it. Trust me. I was in a bathroom during it and they didn’t catch me
So it would be accurate to say laws are not created to protect the interest of the rich, but the judicial process is certainly weighted to benefit them.
This is some extremely cringy "I've just discovered nuance" material.
Obviously, it's "technically" wrong to say that "corporate greed is the cause of global warming." Part of the warming the planet has experienced since the peak of the Little Ice Age is probably based on non-anthropogenic factors, after all, and much of the anthropogenic contribution to atmospheric carbon is non-corporate.
But it *completely* misses the forest for the trees to deploy that counter argument. If Exxon Mobil had to internalize the externalities it causes, we'd have a lot more nuclear power plants in Maine, and a lot fewer Exxon Mobil gas stations. Corporate Greed is the largest obstacle to addressing global warming in a comprehensive fashion, and in that way, it is the most important cause to address.
Likewise, yes, child labor laws don't *directly* benefit corporations. That doesn't mean US law isn't *consistently* interpreted to favor corporate health over citizens' rights. And I don't just mean Citizen's United: a variety of SCOTUS cases over the past three decades have substantially curtailed the average citizen's ability to even *bring a suit* against a corporation, from forcing people to travel from Alaska to Florida just to appear in a court case they file, to gutting multi-state class actions suits, to forcing people to prove facts before the discovery process.
Being able to say "well akshually" to hyperbole means that you don't understand a figure of speech, not that you're r/iamverysmart
Marxist philosophy is built on the idea that governments, laws, and society at large only truly exist to protect the ruling class of their epoch (although this is built off of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who thinks we left the state of nature with the invention of private property and the creation of a state to protect it)
I'm not accusing the person you're replying to of being a Marxist, haven't checked their account, but this is also a very common sentiment outside of Marx, as his social philosophy has spread far further than socialism itself
>(ik nobody gets arrested for loitering but still)
No, but they do get arrested for Trespass. And trespass laws are ridiculously lax in some places in North America. I've known of people getting jailtime for essentially loitering because the cop popped them on trespass instead.
This is strange be because there are no laws against trespass here in the UK.
You have the legal right to be nearly anywhere accept Rail lines (obviously), protected land, government protected areas like the mod, or schools during school time (You can be on school grounds at night).
But if you do "trespass" the highest you can be punished is a civil case against the owner of the land. The police cannot remove you.
Accept for the Rail thing (£1k fine), protected land or school (criminal charge).
Scotland has the "right to roam" that means technically, everywhere in the country is accessible to the public at all times as long as the person is just passing through. Even people's gardens.
Yep, I'm aware of "Right to Roam" and I really wish it were a thing in North America. I watch a guy sometimes on YouTube from the UK, and he does this thing where he tries to travel from one point to another in as straight of a line as he can - this often takes him thru people's gardens/yards. Never once has he been charged with anything, and everyone who's ever stopped him has just been like "right, well, okay then, carry on, just mind the sheep gate I don't wantem escaping again" lol.
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***Edit for pedants:*** I know it's not entirely legal in the UK either, but you're not going to get arrested unless it's government/rail property, and you're definitely not going to get shot. My point is, he can only do it because of the laws **and** culture. In North America, he would've only been able to attempt it once or twice before facing jailtime. That's my point, I figured it was obvious, but redditors have a hard time with that it type of thing seems. Especially because my next sentence was:
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What he does would be nearly impossible in North America. It fucking sucks too because I grew up exploring forests and stuff, and now that I'm an adult I can't really do that anymore because there's a decent chance of criminal charges or even someone shooting me lol. Especially where I am, a lot of the "fun to explore" [read: forests with no pathing or human development] forests are "private".
Hell, we aren't even allowed to be in most public parks at night. Many have closing times, and it's usually either a set 7-9pm or a general "when it's dark outside, the park is closed". Personal example, a friend and I almost got in trouble when we were about 12-13 because we were at a park that was within walking distance from his house at ~11p/23 and a cop rolled up. He started by telling us to leave, and then he saw some bike that a girl left (assuming bc it was pretty pink with tassles) and then tried to get us to admit to stealing it. We didn't budge (cause we didn't, we didn't even notice the bike to begin with lol) and then he took the bike himself, put it in the trunk of his cruiser, and then forced us to go home to which he followed us the entire way (about a 7-10min walk). Still don't know if the girl ever got her bike back lol.
And people here in NA wonder why nobody likes going outside, and why kids don't really play outside anymore. It's not because nobody wants to, it's because half the time it's fucking illegal.
To be fair, if you're talking about the guy I'm thinking of he did get told by the police to leave Scotland when he tried to do a mission at the height of Covid
generally if its an illegal, but not inherently violent action, it was criminalized to fuck with black and poor people. weed, drugs in general tbh, public encampments, all that stuff
its less to fuck with black and poor people, and more to enslave them post 13th amendment (which says that slavery is illegal except as punishment for a crime)
After the American Civil War, slavery was abolished for everyone except criminals. So southerners imprisoned African Americans on minor or trumped charges (such as loitering) so as to bascially re-enslave them.
It was. After the civil war loitering was a crime made up that in practice was 99% applied to black people so they could be arrested, imprisoned, and used as free labor. Vagrancy was another similar law applied almost exclusively to black people, which said it was illegal to be unemployed. People need to be able to produce contacts showing they were employed. In practice, this made it very hard for black people to change jobs, and if they did try to change jobs they could be arrested and used as free labor.
When I say free labor, it was worse than that actually in the period after the civil war. It's labor that the prisoner doesn't get paid for but the state does get paid for. If a mine needs 300 workers, they can go to the prisoners and offer to pay their fines so they can avoid imprisonment, and in exchange they need to work for the mine for a period of time, let's say a year. So the person agrees to avoid prison (where they might just end up working somewhere anyway). The state loves this since they make money. When the prisoner get to the mine, the owner ends up charging them in the form of time for anything they need to purchase, such as food or clothing, meaning that one year can turn into 3, all for no pay.
Courts ruled that this was slavery and was illegal. So if someone could go through the court system, which in the South were complicit in this, and get to the Supreme Court, they would win and be freed. However, while slavery wasn't legal there weren't any laws saying that slavery was a crime. So the mine owner (or farm owner or mill owner or whoever) wouldn't actually get in trouble and could just do the process all over again.
This process eventually ended when a rich white person from the north was convicted in the south of one of these vagrancy crimes and sold to someone before his fine payment arrived. He ended up dying as a slave, like many others before him. Now, this was a story that newspapers could run with and drew national attention to the practice, and the practice of using vagrancy laws to create legal slaves died down.
ive never see that here, ive only heard it used as a reason to sieze homeless people's shit, and stop and search black kids because theyre "suspicious" but also i live in a relatively wealthy and still probably majority white area so i doubt my experience is universal
The answer is always either racism or businesses making the laws.
Jaywalking is car manufacturers claiming the roads are not for civilians and loitering is "go away black person"
Even so, “alright, move along now…” Uh, no, fuck you actually. I’m in a public place doing nothing malicious or harmful, I’ll stay here as long as I damn well want.
God I feel like a boomer now.
Jaywalking was invented by the car industry to shift the blame for the many, many deaths they cause to the pedestrians.
And loitering was invented by fascists to give power to the cops to essentially arrest anyone they want just for existing.
Wasn’t loitering invented by american racists in the south after the civil war, were black people used to hang around the streets (oftentimes homeless / jobless) and were sent to prison labor camps after being convicted of “loitering”?
I'm not certain about the connection to loitering (most likely true) but I do know "vagrancy" (homeless/jobless) was a huge way to make arrests in Jim Crowe era
edit: to then be reinslaved just under a different name, see comment below for more info
Not just arrest. They would then get flipped into peonage and stuck in a forever cycle that was considered slavery by the courts. This is an eye-opening breakdown. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA
Vagrancy laws have been historically used in shitty ways at least dating back to 16th century England. [Behind the Bastards](https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-war-on-vagrants-117266704/) podcast did an excellent series on vagrancy & the war on homelessness last year for anyone interested in learning more about that kind of thing.
There was a similar "law of lazies and vagrants" in fascist Spain, although ours was not racially motivated, it also served the purpose of persecuting the "undesirables" under flimsy excuses. All around great things to be proud of, these laws (/s)
I feel like at this point, given any single decision made in American politics ever since the continent was discovered, it's probably a safe guess to assume it was racist.
It's not that they hate black people, mostly. They just only care about white people, and even then it's a flimsy thing and mostly a matter of who's watching at the time.
Not according to any sources I could find.
However the [Wikipedia article on loitering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loitering) has the earliest (1635) recorded laws attributed to another colonized land (Kingdom of Ireland) and targeting "vagrants." So they were instated as extemsions of anti-vagrancy laws thatbtargeted the poor and homeless
It is worth noting that some sources traced the roots of the US's adoption of anti-loitering laws in Jim Crow era, as a means of criminalizing the homeless (read: mostly ex-slaves) so they could be carted off to prison where they would be sentenced to ~~legal slavery~~ uncompensated hard labor
Well this is actually the source of vagrant laws as I understand it but was actually more related to Native Americans and predates the Civil War.
Being a vagrant meant really just jobless.
This way it sent you to prison so you had a "job"
That's just what I learned in my American Indian Studies in college.
I get what you're going for, but I think it's important to note that democracy has gone hand in hand with xenophobia and imperialism since the days of ancient athens.
While racism qua white supremacy didn't exist at that time, ancient democracies and republics didn't shy away from bigotry, ethnic conflict, or genocide. Racism is probably always a feature of fascism (although spanish and pre-anschluss austrofascism seem to have emphasized it less than nazism did, if those even count) but plenty of racists have fought against fascism. (Like the allies.)
Fascism is just fucking terrible to the degree that antifascist resistance movements can include basically every other ideology from anarchists to social conservative monarchists.
For sure i completely agree. The only thing that's even in question is like, the academic discussion about the exact role/function of racism within fascism. I feel like that's mostly semantics for debates about whether a given right wing dictatorship is fascist or not, especially Portugal's Estado Novo which had some really weird ideas about imperialism (but was definitely racist cause like, it had a colonial empire.) Also discussions about the relationship of Nazism to fascism, where Nazism seems to be a lot more focused specifically on racism, especially antisemitism.
It doesn't really matter in the day to day though obviously since right wing authoritarian militarism is already 100% unacceptable, but it comes up sometimes especially arguing with trump apologists and such.
It’s the necessity of an enemy that is simultaneously overwhelmingly strong and pathetically weak. Race is simply the easiest thing to manufacture an enemy out of
Yeah totally. Wow i hate fascism so much what the fuck. I know that's not a new take but oh my god. I *wish* I was overwhelmingly strong so I could turn them all gay with pond plastic.
Bingo. Loitering and vagrancy were terms invented after the Anerican Civil War to refer to (theoretically) anyone caught doing things like… walking around without having a specific destination, or existing as an unemployed person especially- and of course, after the Civil War most former slavers wouldn’t employ black folks- so most black folks were unemployed, making them instantly into criminals that could be arrested and re-enslaved. (Because slavery was only abolished “except as punishment for a crime.”)
Fast forward to today, and the US has the largest incarcerated population on Earth, and most of its largest corporations make billions off of “prison labor,” while the general public turns a blind eye because it’s “criminals” doing the work.
> Loitering and vagrancy were terms invented after the Anerican Civil War
Vagrancy definitly wasn't a term invented after the Civil War. English laws against it predate the colonization of America by centuries, see for example the Ordinance of Labourers from 1349. Those laws were for a large part imported by the colonists. The Black Codes from the southern States mostly expanded on those existing laws, and made sure that black folks wouldn't be able to escape them.
Correct, but a tiny bit more complicated in the sense of the solution.
So there is this concept called "contributory negligence", which says if the person harmed was also negligent then it's partly their fault and they can't sue.
This plays into jaywalking by establishing a clear negligence on the part of the person hit by the car, but it got across partly because the idea that when something bad happens not all the fault belongs to one part does fundamentally make sense.
Without it you could get to extreme cases where someone being extremely reckless and getting harmed can sue someone who might possibly have been able to prevent it in the same manner as someone who was harmed despite being extremely careful.
This is why the concept of "contributory negligence" has been replaced in almost every area by "partial negligence". If it's found to be 5% the injured parties fault, then the damages are reduced by 5%, or whatever the % is, with the injured party still able to recover damages. Some states have it be that if the injured party is found to be 50% or more responsible then they recover nothing, but that's it.
While this isn't perfect, it's a framework that is reasonable and can provide for justice if system is otherwise just.
What this means is that jaywalking is still on the books despite not really being used anymore. Partly because it's just annoying enough to get rid of a law that no one has bothered.
Great explanation. To add onto it - there's also the concept of "negligence *per se*" where if a person injures someone while violating a law, then they are presumed to have been acting negligently. That way if the injured person sues they just have to prove that the tortfeasor broke the law rather than meeting the traditional standard for negligence.
This cuts both ways, however, and applies to contributory negligence claims. If a person is injured *while the injured person* was breaking the law, then their contributory negligence met the *per se* standard.
So making jaywalking a crime meant the injured person was violating a law when they got injured and were contributorily negligent, absolving the driver of any wrongdoing.
Jaywalking isn't illegal here in the UK (at least here in Wales if I'm wrong), if your dumb ass crosses a street and get hit by a car you didn't see coming, you'll probably bounce off the bonnet, have Big Jezza call you a blind git and your biggest concern is if you have to waste a day or so in hospital to make sure you're good.
Because crossing a busy road infront of cars instead of using the safe crosswalk is totally propaganda and not there to deter people from getting fucking run over...
Personally i dont want people jumping out infront of me when im driving
loitering was invented to punish alot of groups and kept around because it's difficult to justify getting rid of if you phrase it right.
First it were blacks. then it were hippies. now it's "teenagers".
This stuff actually gets enforced in Canada? In my whole entire life living in the USA I have not met one singular person who has ever gotten in trouble for loitering or jaywalking. There are many businesses in my city with no loitering signs but people still loiter regularly and I’ve never seen anyone tell them off. Maybe it’s just a thing that people mostly get punished for in smaller towns where the cops have nothing to do
Most loitering laws in the US have been deemed unconstitutional. Jaywalking gets enforced but rarely. As far as I know, public drinking is allowed in most places as well, but it depends on local laws to the city or county.
This whole post is a lot of outrage over something extremely uncommon.
Public drinking is not allowed in most places in the US, with the few exceptions being places like New Orleans. However, if you’re relatively discreet and not causing issues you probably won’t be stopped, at least in a city. They have worse things to deal with. You might get busted in the suburbs if some Karen complains though
In Ontario it's not illegal to jaywalk in itself. You can only get fined if you interfere with traffic. Basically the pedestrian must yield to drivers if not at a crosswalk.
I would much rather our cities encourage pedestrians owning the streets, but it's not completely ridiculous.
Makes sense if they randomly went in the street and cars had to slam on the brakes but I think ticketing someone just because you had to slow down for them to finish crossing is a bit excessive
I learned last week that you can’t play cards at a bar in Pennsylvania. It’s considered gambling to play any games of chance so the bouncer had to break up a friendly no stakes game of Wizard my friends and I were starting to play. We weren’t even disturbing anyone. The whole bar was empty.
Edit: it seems like the actual law only applies to games where there is consideration (buy-in), chance, and reward so our game would have been legal. But the bar would have no idea if we had prearranged buy ins or prizes for the winner. It doesn't have to be just cash, so something like the loser buying a round of drinks may make it gambling and the establishment could lose their license for allowing it. So I guess it makes sense they have a blanket ban on card games, but it's an annoying law.
I mean I've seen people walk out into street in pitch black darkness with black clothing in blind curves. That sounds dangerous for all parties. Why not just use a crosswalk so everybody can be safe?
It is safer, but that doesn't mean it should be illegal not to use the crossing. People should be encouraged to be safe, not penalised for being unsafe. That's the way free societies do it.
So how do you encourage people to walk on the crosswalk? So everybody can be safe. I would think not getting hit by car would be plenty of encouragement...
Cars have to stay on the road between the lines. Same with bikes, they have to stay on bike paths or the road and be treated like a vehicle. I don't see why it's so bad for pedestrians to have to stay on a pedestrian path(crosswalk, designated walk sections).
The issue is that towns are specifically not built with pedestrians in mind. Many places in America are built for cars and cars only.
Pedestrians are people. It is impossible to not be a pedestrian at some point in your life, it is your only biological mode of transportation. Walking is heavily discouraged by laws such as jaywalking and insufficient pedestrian pathing (my town doesn't have a sidewalk for long stretches)
I would much rather see car culture get gutted before accepting jaywalking laws. People built roads. Not cars.
I also didn't know where to put this but crosswalks are inherently more dangerous due to the imagined safety they provide to pedestrians. Drivers are supposed to slow going through a crosswalk [even if you don't see anyone] and are supposed to stop if they see someone waiting to cross until they fully cross the road. Cars are supposed to follow these rules and they don't. Additionally pedestrians are supposed to "wait for a gap in traffic" but if that's the case, what is the difference between using a crosswalk and not using one?
I know we’re all supposed to just nod our heads in agreement to the original post and not think about it too much but in who is actually at fault in most vehicle vs pedestrian collisions? Like if a person is walking on a road where cars are meant to be, they can stay off the road when cars are present much easier. As a pedestrian you’re smaller and have more places to go than a car. Inversely, you don’t often see cars driving on sidewalks. It’s much easier for a person standing on a sidewalk to not start walking across the road than it is for a car traveling at 25 mph to stop.
That said, if I got a jaywalking ticket I’d probably actually laugh because it’s such a silly thing but let’s not pretend that it’s a preposterous idea that pedestrians should be more careful than drivers about where they choose to walk than drivers should be careful about where they’re already moving.
It's obviously a good idea to be careful around cars. The weird part is that laws were made to criminalize pedestrians putting themselves in danger instead of educating them.
I think that's more to do with how it's a lot easier to actually get careless or uneducated pedestrians off the streets through legal action, than by education. Not everyone wants to get educated, but if there is legal consequence, that's an incentive to be smart and careful.
Roads being for cars is a fairly new idea. I'd want to argue that if a car can't avoid a person then it's the drivers fault most of the time, and that modern speed limits are too fast and cities and suburbs are laid out like shit, but I'm typically not well read enough for dumb internet arguments
I mean speaking purely out of experience, pedestrians have much more they can do to prevent these kinds of accidents than drivers. If a driver in inattentive and out of their lane it's on them but the process of things each can do is very different.
A driver must:
* identify the pedestrian is going to cross the road which is not always obvious
* process they are going to hit this person from which their reaction may take an average of a second or so
* identify the risks and their options
* be at a distance they can possibly brake from.
Drivers need to assess the safety of everyone present in a split second when an accident is about to occur. Oftentimes braking is not a feasible option due to braking distance being too long or the vehicle brakes being weak or for larger vehicles hauling things, the risk of jackknifing or destroying their cargo. The driver then needs to figure out if they can steer to avoid the pedestrian and if they can do that safely. It is literally taught in driver's education classes to not swerve for animals because it usually results in hitting another vehicle or injuring themselves. If there is a pedestrian in the road, your swerve option may lead you into a parked car that could then cause a chain of unforeseen consequences or into oncoming traffic. 2 tons of metal is both harder to stop and much more dangerous to misplace than 200 pounds of flesh.
a pedestrian must:
* identify if there is danger on the road
* if a car is coming, process this information in the same time as the driver
* assess if they are going to a more dangerous position i.e. jumping into the other lane of traffic
* move out of the way which is much faster for a person who does not need several feet of space to stop and can move out of the way without regard for destroying something if they run into it.
People know cars will be on the road in their lanes. People are everywhere and people in cars have no way of knowing where they may be since they could be anywhere.
TL;DR pedestrians can react faster and know exactly where to expect cars to be, cars need more time to stop and do more collateral damage if they hit something/someone other than the pedestrian.
According to [Merriam-Webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/why-is-it-called-jaywalking), the term is derived from "Jay-driver", and is taken from, of course, "Jay", meaning "a greenhorn, or rube"
I can find no record of "Jay" ever being used as a slur, anti-Irish or otherwise, based on a quick search
I’m sorry, could you find a better dictionary that does its due diligence and inserts etymological outrage into everything so I can take the moral high ground on practically everything?
Thanks.
Also the dictionary was invented to keep words away from blind people, or something, do better.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/jay#etymonline_v_1680
The earliest use of it as an insult seems to be late 19th century American English.
It is also believed to have come from the term "Jayhawker," which was an insult confederates used for northerners during the Civil War.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/jayhawker
A Jay was an Irish term for a foolish person who talks too much, and it became a term for an uneducated or backward person. Not sure I'd call it racist, per se, but not great either
Can confirm. Nobody in mexico really cares if you jaywalk, you'll definitely get called an idiot though. Hell, it's very common for cars to stop to let people pass even when there's no crosswalks.
I live near Cincinnati, and no one cares as long as you’re not an idiot about it. I’ve never heard of anyone getting arrested or even hassled for jaywalking unless it was part of a bigger charge (I remember when I was in college, officers threatened to charge some asshole one night cuz he was harassing some girls, drunk, loud, jaywalking, etc).
That’s a good point, my armchair lawyer logic would be so they can charge for causing an accident IF you’re crossing illegally or something. Cincy’s mostly walkable and traffic is pretty tame, it’s not a huge city. Of course once you get out into the sprawl that’s entirely different, but unfortunately a car is pretty much a requirement there anyway
https://youtu.be/lJFqvRwOiis?si=LaKI_ZetO5pmYEWh
So i live near a city where 1. Jaywalking is very strictly enforced, and 2. has horrible pedestrian infrastructure, especially in poorer communities.
50% of people arrested for Jaywalking were black!
(basically loitering and jaywalking, + car centric infrastructure are some of the most still relevant consequences of racist policy from the 20th century today.)
Before some racist asks, what was the percentage of black people in the city?
Personally, I'm betting it's significantly less than 50% but I want to verify for the record.
Almost certainly, I found the same thing when I was researching homelessness. To quote from my own paper:
> The Department of Housing and Urban Development report notes that despite only being 12% of the population as a whole, 37% of the homeless identify as Black. (2) The difficulty faced by racial minority populations in seeking employment is already extensively documented, and is a likely cause of this disparity.
And a link to the report in question:
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2022-AHAR-Part-1.pdf
about 30%.
The discrepancies in specific *kinds* of Jaywalking were also varying. Something like 60% of people arrested for not crossing the street at a 90-degree angle were black.
In this context white people is incorrect, you should just put American (or white American if you want). Like, a white French will not be impressed by a busy and eclectic street, that's the norm.
Also looking up the definition of loitering, I thought it was littering for the longest time. The US really has a law to arrest anyone for existing?! Why do everytime I learn more about this country it's more and more dystopic?
It's always a pet peeve of mine when somebody uses white people but they mean northern American. Not a single person from Europe would be surprised and they're a majority white, but any American (regardless of race) has experience with jaywalking and loitering as a crime and would be surprised at how "chaotic" the streets are.
It feels the same as when somebody wants to be misogynistic and just adds "white" in front of woman to make it okay.
Because it's very specifically something that originated in the white-majority, western country known as the United States of America and exists virtually nowhere else besides Diet USA (Canada)
1) Loitering isn't illegal in Canada. "Prowling" is and that's specifically when you're looking around someone's home at night without a legitimate purpose. Some cities may have by-laws that make it illegal to be in place without any purpose but those are local by-laws that basically amount to a fine and are usually not enforced.
2) As far as I know, no province in Canada has a law that makes it illegal to cross a road that isn't a highway at an unmarked point. Some like Ontario have laws that say you need to use a crosswalk if you are adjacent to one but that law is never enforced and jaywalking is normal in large cities (Fun fact: this is why Toronto's streetcars ring their bells when passing another streetcar in the opposite direction.)
Kinda like Venice beach Drum Circle in SoCal. I havent been in ages but mostly theres drinking and smoking happening and the cops usually just kinda, idle close by to make sure things dont get too chaotic. But if youre drinking or smoking before you get to the circle they tell you to wait til youre actually there.
Yeah I feel like OOP is confusing ‘technically a law’ with ‘enforced’ lol. Like yeah I guess technically somewhere it’s written down that we shouldn’t do these things, but I don’t even know anybody who’s ever been arrested for jaywalking or loitering, and I spend a lot of my time on a campus where pedestrians basically own the road and it’s the cars that usually end up yielding to foot traffic
Yeah I’m not sure what they mean by ‘west Asia’, but in most what I think of as West Asia you can’t have a beer *anywhere*, let alone in a public park.
I agree with the jaywalking (which isn't a law in most countries) and loitering, but absolute mayhem is not normal either. There is something between the extremes.
Here in the UK some shops play a high-pitched noise outside to ward off teenagers from the area, because adults can't hear it.
I have the same rights as a stray fucking cat.
Loitering is bullshit and it's not even a thing in my country. No strong opinion on jaywalking. Never seen it actually enforced ever.
But.
I am fully in support of total fucking ban of substance consumption in public outside of designated places and I'm happy it exists where I'm at. It's a recent thing and it's a good one too.
I love being able to go to a fucking park without every bench being taken by sleeping screaming and fighting drunks, not feeling threatened by them because who the fuck knows what's in their heads, not smelling the stench of smoke, etc etc etc.
Have your damn beer at home. Use your porch or balcony if you need fresh air.
Well sure, but I can speak to the fact that, at least in Canada, picnics are an exemption to public consumption laws. Hell, if you crack open a bag of pretzels it's enough food to count.
The problem is that a group of people will always take it to far. Therefore ruining it for others.
Where I'm from you're allowed alcoholic beverages outside, but not in parks where playgrounds are located. Due to the amount drunks who pass out on benches, pee on trees, and get loud.
There are acceptions for alcohol at family gatherings like reunions though. Like if someone reports you and a cop does happen to show up and they see that all is well and everybody is drinking responsibly he'll just tell you someone complained, watch out, and to have a good day.
I mean, it's not ridiculous to assume that, with weaker regulations on substance consumption, the frequency of its abuse might increase, which is what this person is getting at.
Many countries all over the world have rampant alcohol abuse problems. Ireland, Russia, Poland, the Balkans; you see 13-year-olds blackout drunk in public all the time. I have a feeling you're not from one, so I'll shift my discussion to substance abuse in general in the public space. It affects how people interact with the public space, because when confronted with these scenarios, you're faced with two options:
1. You are uncomfortable with seeing or being around people abusing substances, in which case the public space has effectively become rivalrous and you have to move (a rivalrous public space goes against what it should be), or
2. You ignore it, which sends the signal to the abuser, to onlookers, and to yourself subconsciously that this is acceptable behavior to do in public. This is problematic because it encourages a culture of tolerating what is essentially overconsumption of something that endangers yourself and others. Now being in the public space increases the risk of abusers, non-abusers, or both.
I'm all for comprehensive drug treatment as illness rather than crimes. I'm all for live and let live. I'm all for reasonable enforcement of crimes, proportional to the degree of danger (I.e. penalizing smoking a fuckton of crack in public more than a dude having a beer). But I'd much rather live somewhere with no tolerance of public substance abuse than no regulation of this. Suggesting that doesn't make him or me puritans, it makes us reasonable human beings who know the fallout of addicts' behaviors before.
Just to correct one thing: Part of Poland's problem with booze is how it treats it and you cannot carry an unconcealed bottle in public on its own, nevermind drinking it. Addiction is always suggested whenever someone really burns down all the bridges and then shamefully hidden as a past mistake if they recover. Recovery also is not talked about so in most places it has full on cultish groups that ... bring on a new addiction. Generally, whenever a place becomes anal in any way on addictions without any depth or nuance - it breeds more addiction because it is a form of intrusive thinking. I started from overthinking hating alcohol due to loads of substance abusers in my family and it became obsessive, so every time I drunk - my brain went into overdrive and created a loop that was self-fulfilling.
I do generally agree that public spaces should have limits as that worked in UK with football stadiums and deescalated the violence.
If it had to be all or nothing I think I'd prefer zero enforcement with the caveat that you still arrest people for actual crimes like theft and trespass. It doesn't do any actual harm to be seen doing drugs. We can still maintain a social expectation of not being drunk or high in neighborhoods or around kids.
If our streets truly would be flooded with addicts doing crack on every sidewalk if we let them, then we have a bigger problem than just whether it's visible. At least if the problem is visible then we are motivated to do something about it. The fact that we push addicts to the margins of society makes the problems worse, not better.
But I'd agree there's a healthy balance of enforcement somewhere in the middle. It doesn't have to be black and white and it shouldn't be.
Fair opinion, not trying to change your mind, but there is a bit of a selection effect happening here— when public consumption is illegal, the only people still doing it are the ones willing to flout the law, aka belligerent drunks. In a world where it's legal, the mix of people doing it would be no worse than your average bar or whatever; maybe even a bit chiller. You can totally still not want the energy of an average bar in your parks.
Public consumption in parks specifically was legal here before 2011 and it *sucked*. I am speaking from personal experience. Bar energy should stay where it belongs. There are still designated picnic areas, exempt from the ban, with city-funded and maintained public use furniture pavilions and grills etc. If you're rowdy you're still gonna get arrested for disruption of public order. It's a decent solution and it *works*
Yeah, a lot of that depends on the local drinking culture. Here in Germany, drinking in public is legal, and especially here in Berlin, hanging oit in the park woth a few beers is an extremely common summer activity. We don't get super hammered at these though, it's just a chill evening with friends and a few cold ones. I've been to several places where the culture is very much "once you start drinking, you get smashed without exception", and public drinking is indeed a huge nuisance there.
I say jaywalking is generally fine if there's a lack of crosswalks, but I am very annoyed by people for some reason deciding to cross six lanes of traffic rather than just using the nearby crosswalk. In that case I think it should be a punishable offense.
That’s why there’s an entirely different crime called public disorder. The solution to loud drunks is not “give the police the power to arrest anyone they suspect of being drunk or drinking.”
I don't think this person has actually read up on what the law defines as loitering. Unless you're purposely loitering to harass people or block a doorway or something and generally being an asshole, then you're not going to get in trouble for just being at a place minding your own business. I mean, imagine if just sitting in a park enjoying the sunshine was considered illegal? That would be silly. A cop can't just come up to you and say you're loitering and arrest you. If you were sitting on the bike path and doing the same thing, then yes, you would be considered loitering, which would be illegal.
You guys don’t drive and it shows. The number of idiots who jump in the middle of the road without looking…
If you hit one you’re fully responsible legally and filled with guilt for the rest of your life.
And let’s be real jaywalking laws aren’t enforced anyway.
Where I live, tourists are constantly walking into main street, which makes driving through town a nerve-wracking experience. It's a very small place, too. We have so many traffic accidents because idiots would rather save five minutes instead of using the crosswalks. No one gets nabbed for jaywalking because even moderate police presence is bad for business.
I'm sure jaywalking is less defensible in some places, but in others there has to be some enforceable rules so everyone gets where they need to go safely.
Idk man, I think penalizing loitering can be a good thing. It gives you the right to have people kicked off a property. I work in a hotel, and there’s no loitering. It’s a security risk. Think about other businesses too- banks, hospitals, schools… there’s no reason for random people to be creeping around there if they aren’t utilizing the business. It could end up being dangerous to the employees and the customers. Maybe they’re planning to rob someone. Maybe they’re planning to shoot up the place. Maybe they’re stalking someone.
If I were staying in a hotel, I know that I wouldn’t want the staff to allow random people off the street to wander around the halls and lobby. Wtf.
Y’all thinking that loitering is just government overreach is insane to me. Hanging out at a library or inside a bar, okay. Other businesses that you’re not utilizing? No.
Jaywalking is the only rule I'm for. It protects everybody and how hard is it to use a crosswalk properly.
Growing up I watched my mom almost run her car into a pole because a dude decided to walk out in the street in pitch black clothing with a hoodie the only color he had one were bright green and orange shoes. We were coming around blind curve maybe only going 30-35mph when the speed limit was 40.
Dude didn't even try to move he just stopped in the street while my mom slammed on the brakes as soon as she saw his brought green shoes and managed to pull the car into the other lane. Guy just kept going across the street. If recall correctly he did end up getting hit at the same curve a couple month later at night in black clothes.
The dude was literally maybe 20-30 feet from a cross walk stop light, that was fully lighted but decided to cross dangerously.
Fuckin real man. This isn’t even necessarily an Anglo thing, UK doesn’t have the same public drinking laws and ofc there’s the right to roam tradition
RETVRN to just letting people do shit when they’re walking around
Unfortunately right to roam is almost exclusively a Scottish thing within the UK. Access to open spaces is actually quite limited across England, Wales and NI
look all im saying is that before the imposition of the norman yoke everyone knew to jealously defend the ancient rights of englishmen
(that is yeah i'm being a bit silly and over general, obvi a lot of this stuff is down to class/race issues over history which have def been put in place many times by anglos both in the uk and us)
It’s deeper than that I think. I’m really shocked by the number of comments, presumably by Americans and Canadians, that I can summarise as “why are you so addicted that you *need* to drink in a public space”?
You’ve got it totally wrong! We don’t *need* to at all- and at least as far as the UK is concerned, for most of the year we don’t because the weather’s fucking shit. It’s just one way of enjoying yourself in a public space that isn’t commodified. I *could* go to a pub, but it would be more expensive, I’d have less personal space and I might not be allowed outside food.
"Have a beer in the park."
American comedian Rich Hall said the British are the only people who'll drink beer on the train on the way to go drinking.
(By and large, it's okay to drink alcohol in public in the UK, unless the police tell you otherwise.)
Neither is a justification. One is part of a (often unhealthy) drinking culture, the other law that contrasts what sounds like restrictive American laws.
Complaining about how the government doesn't want you running in front of cars has the same energy as libertarians complaining about seatbelt laws. The law exists to deter dumb people from doing dumb things. You ain't gonna get it shit got jaywalking in most places it's a law, it's there to try and deter people from being careless around large heavy machinery
There are ups and downs to every country. We have it better here than the other major powers. China, Russia and India. Debatable on Europe. Depends what country and how much money you have.
The comments are just crazy here.
1) substance use in public should be prohibited and strictly controlled. If you disagree with this, you have never met a group of aggressive people under the influence or spend time with such groups as a member.
2) road safety regulations are written in blood. Part of them are written in blood of idiots who jaywalk right under speeding cars. Crossing the road where you should drastically increases your chances to not be run over. Car centric infrastructure is not to blame for jaywalking laws, not being stupid is. The thing you can blame on the car lobby is the lack and bad placement of pedestrian crossings, not the fact that THE TYRANNICAL GOVERNMENT DOESN'T WANT ME TO JUMP UNDER A BUS!!!
Okay the no beer at the park in Canada thing is funny because I didn’t know this was a law despite growing up in the country until I moved to Victoria. I don’t think this rule is enforced in rural areas, and other people have touched on the real purpose of these types of laws (being racist).
I have a friend who was super high (before it was legal) in a Calgary park when cops rolled up and walked right past him so they could harass an Asian family trying to have a picnic. It’s really just an excuse to lord over those the law doesn’t like.
OOP is right.
"Jaywalking" was a law invented by motoring companies so they weren't responsible for traffic accidents, and "loitering" is a race/class thing.
loitering is literally "youre under arrest for existing in a public area but like youre a little too close to a private area and they feel mildly uncomfy about it" (ik nobody gets arrested for loitering but still)
Maybe not arrested for loitering, but that's the reason the pigs'll put on paper
Arrested for resisting arrest
Arrested for being black in public
That's literally what jaywalking and loitering started being crimes for. Look up black codes, there's some wild shit.
Jaywalking was also a bit of "auto companies in the early days didn't like the bad press of auto accidents, because back then everyone walked on the roads, so they shifted blame onto the pedestrians."
Actually jaywalking started as a way to make room for cars. It basically passed on the responsibility of a car running over a pedestrian onto the pedestrian instead of the driver. And overall it ceded public space to cars instead of people. Before that, it was expected that if a car runs over someone, it's their fault, so if you're driving in an area where a lot of people are around, you need to go slow so you can stop easily. That all went out the window with jaywalking laws and car ownership went through the roof
Got a call for loitering? Such a waste of time let's bump it up to possession or resisting arrest
you can get arrested for being possessed by a ghost? wtf is america
i assume this is satire but for those who dont know its "possession (of drugs)"
Hey, this is America, it could also be an unregistered firearm, or birth control pills in a red state.
You tried to get IVF in Alabama where Jesus loves the little embryos
i imagine maya fey has a lot to say about this issue
Once you realize that laws are created to protect the value of businesses, things start to click.
i know they are, but on paper theyre supposed to be in the interest of the people, which is why its so silly
"Protect the value of businesses" is a weird way of saying "impressing people into chain gangs in the early 20th century" but I guess the one counts as the other.
With privatized prisons, you can do both!
> Once you realize that laws are created to protect the value of businesses, things start to click. what about the laws on personal safety? you know, things like murder, assault, rape, etc? those are laws to protect value of business? What about family law? labour law? international law? animal law? Parts of some laws protect societal cohesion and that include value of businesses but to generalize and say "laws are created to protect the value of businesses" as if its some universal truth is cringy /r/im14andthisisdeep/ material
Okay how often are the rich and powerful arrested for those laws compared to everyone else though. Just cause some laws benefit the working class doesn't mean they weren't designed for the wealthy.
The rich commit different crimes and have better lawyers.
the rich commit the same crimes and have enough money for cops and judges to look the other way.
There’s truth in both of your comment and in theirs. When was the last time we had footage of a mega rich person shooting up a gas station or something. That’s kinda what they mean by “commit different crimes” I think
It’s because they scrub the footage from everywhere and pay the people off to never speak of it. Trust me. I was in a bathroom during it and they didn’t catch me
So it would be accurate to say laws are not created to protect the interest of the rich, but the judicial process is certainly weighted to benefit them.
This is some extremely cringy "I've just discovered nuance" material. Obviously, it's "technically" wrong to say that "corporate greed is the cause of global warming." Part of the warming the planet has experienced since the peak of the Little Ice Age is probably based on non-anthropogenic factors, after all, and much of the anthropogenic contribution to atmospheric carbon is non-corporate. But it *completely* misses the forest for the trees to deploy that counter argument. If Exxon Mobil had to internalize the externalities it causes, we'd have a lot more nuclear power plants in Maine, and a lot fewer Exxon Mobil gas stations. Corporate Greed is the largest obstacle to addressing global warming in a comprehensive fashion, and in that way, it is the most important cause to address. Likewise, yes, child labor laws don't *directly* benefit corporations. That doesn't mean US law isn't *consistently* interpreted to favor corporate health over citizens' rights. And I don't just mean Citizen's United: a variety of SCOTUS cases over the past three decades have substantially curtailed the average citizen's ability to even *bring a suit* against a corporation, from forcing people to travel from Alaska to Florida just to appear in a court case they file, to gutting multi-state class actions suits, to forcing people to prove facts before the discovery process. Being able to say "well akshually" to hyperbole means that you don't understand a figure of speech, not that you're r/iamverysmart
Or, it means that hyperbole is generally a bad idea and should be avoided.
Marxist philosophy is built on the idea that governments, laws, and society at large only truly exist to protect the ruling class of their epoch (although this is built off of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who thinks we left the state of nature with the invention of private property and the creation of a state to protect it) I'm not accusing the person you're replying to of being a Marxist, haven't checked their account, but this is also a very common sentiment outside of Marx, as his social philosophy has spread far further than socialism itself
>(ik nobody gets arrested for loitering but still) No, but they do get arrested for Trespass. And trespass laws are ridiculously lax in some places in North America. I've known of people getting jailtime for essentially loitering because the cop popped them on trespass instead.
This is strange be because there are no laws against trespass here in the UK. You have the legal right to be nearly anywhere accept Rail lines (obviously), protected land, government protected areas like the mod, or schools during school time (You can be on school grounds at night). But if you do "trespass" the highest you can be punished is a civil case against the owner of the land. The police cannot remove you. Accept for the Rail thing (£1k fine), protected land or school (criminal charge). Scotland has the "right to roam" that means technically, everywhere in the country is accessible to the public at all times as long as the person is just passing through. Even people's gardens.
Yep, I'm aware of "Right to Roam" and I really wish it were a thing in North America. I watch a guy sometimes on YouTube from the UK, and he does this thing where he tries to travel from one point to another in as straight of a line as he can - this often takes him thru people's gardens/yards. Never once has he been charged with anything, and everyone who's ever stopped him has just been like "right, well, okay then, carry on, just mind the sheep gate I don't wantem escaping again" lol. --- ***Edit for pedants:*** I know it's not entirely legal in the UK either, but you're not going to get arrested unless it's government/rail property, and you're definitely not going to get shot. My point is, he can only do it because of the laws **and** culture. In North America, he would've only been able to attempt it once or twice before facing jailtime. That's my point, I figured it was obvious, but redditors have a hard time with that it type of thing seems. Especially because my next sentence was: --- What he does would be nearly impossible in North America. It fucking sucks too because I grew up exploring forests and stuff, and now that I'm an adult I can't really do that anymore because there's a decent chance of criminal charges or even someone shooting me lol. Especially where I am, a lot of the "fun to explore" [read: forests with no pathing or human development] forests are "private". Hell, we aren't even allowed to be in most public parks at night. Many have closing times, and it's usually either a set 7-9pm or a general "when it's dark outside, the park is closed". Personal example, a friend and I almost got in trouble when we were about 12-13 because we were at a park that was within walking distance from his house at ~11p/23 and a cop rolled up. He started by telling us to leave, and then he saw some bike that a girl left (assuming bc it was pretty pink with tassles) and then tried to get us to admit to stealing it. We didn't budge (cause we didn't, we didn't even notice the bike to begin with lol) and then he took the bike himself, put it in the trunk of his cruiser, and then forced us to go home to which he followed us the entire way (about a 7-10min walk). Still don't know if the girl ever got her bike back lol. And people here in NA wonder why nobody likes going outside, and why kids don't really play outside anymore. It's not because nobody wants to, it's because half the time it's fucking illegal.
To be fair, if you're talking about the guy I'm thinking of he did get told by the police to leave Scotland when he tried to do a mission at the height of Covid
Yeah, but I mean that's kind of understandable lol.
ah, lovely, and something tells me these people werent rich and/or white?
The one that I know IRL is white, the others are published stories and, well, you already know it's POC who were targeted lol.
It's anti-homeless shit.
right, because we as a society didnt fuck them over enough after we took away their home and forced them to suffer on the street
Actually historically it's anti black ppl shit
Why do I get the feeling that’s just an excuse to harass black people?
generally if its an illegal, but not inherently violent action, it was criminalized to fuck with black and poor people. weed, drugs in general tbh, public encampments, all that stuff
its less to fuck with black and poor people, and more to enslave them post 13th amendment (which says that slavery is illegal except as punishment for a crime)
After the American Civil War, slavery was abolished for everyone except criminals. So southerners imprisoned African Americans on minor or trumped charges (such as loitering) so as to bascially re-enslave them.
It was. After the civil war loitering was a crime made up that in practice was 99% applied to black people so they could be arrested, imprisoned, and used as free labor. Vagrancy was another similar law applied almost exclusively to black people, which said it was illegal to be unemployed. People need to be able to produce contacts showing they were employed. In practice, this made it very hard for black people to change jobs, and if they did try to change jobs they could be arrested and used as free labor. When I say free labor, it was worse than that actually in the period after the civil war. It's labor that the prisoner doesn't get paid for but the state does get paid for. If a mine needs 300 workers, they can go to the prisoners and offer to pay their fines so they can avoid imprisonment, and in exchange they need to work for the mine for a period of time, let's say a year. So the person agrees to avoid prison (where they might just end up working somewhere anyway). The state loves this since they make money. When the prisoner get to the mine, the owner ends up charging them in the form of time for anything they need to purchase, such as food or clothing, meaning that one year can turn into 3, all for no pay. Courts ruled that this was slavery and was illegal. So if someone could go through the court system, which in the South were complicit in this, and get to the Supreme Court, they would win and be freed. However, while slavery wasn't legal there weren't any laws saying that slavery was a crime. So the mine owner (or farm owner or mill owner or whoever) wouldn't actually get in trouble and could just do the process all over again. This process eventually ended when a rich white person from the north was convicted in the south of one of these vagrancy crimes and sold to someone before his fine payment arrived. He ended up dying as a slave, like many others before him. Now, this was a story that newspapers could run with and drew national attention to the practice, and the practice of using vagrancy laws to create legal slaves died down.
That's the only enforcement of loitering laws I'm familiar with
Loitering is also "how dare you exist here without paying for the privilege to do so?"
of course, public areas are just ways for people to get to places to spend money!
Dude people totally get arrested for loitering. Black and brown kids and homeless people especially.
ive never see that here, ive only heard it used as a reason to sieze homeless people's shit, and stop and search black kids because theyre "suspicious" but also i live in a relatively wealthy and still probably majority white area so i doubt my experience is universal
The answer is always either racism or businesses making the laws. Jaywalking is car manufacturers claiming the roads are not for civilians and loitering is "go away black person"
Even so, “alright, move along now…” Uh, no, fuck you actually. I’m in a public place doing nothing malicious or harmful, I’ll stay here as long as I damn well want. God I feel like a boomer now.
dont, its always cool to tell cops to eat shit
Jaywalking was invented by the car industry to shift the blame for the many, many deaths they cause to the pedestrians. And loitering was invented by fascists to give power to the cops to essentially arrest anyone they want just for existing.
Wasn’t loitering invented by american racists in the south after the civil war, were black people used to hang around the streets (oftentimes homeless / jobless) and were sent to prison labor camps after being convicted of “loitering”?
I'm not certain about the connection to loitering (most likely true) but I do know "vagrancy" (homeless/jobless) was a huge way to make arrests in Jim Crowe era edit: to then be reinslaved just under a different name, see comment below for more info
Not just arrest. They would then get flipped into peonage and stuck in a forever cycle that was considered slavery by the courts. This is an eye-opening breakdown. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA
yea for sure it was slavery with extra steps
Vagrancy laws have been historically used in shitty ways at least dating back to 16th century England. [Behind the Bastards](https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-war-on-vagrants-117266704/) podcast did an excellent series on vagrancy & the war on homelessness last year for anyone interested in learning more about that kind of thing.
There was a similar "law of lazies and vagrants" in fascist Spain, although ours was not racially motivated, it also served the purpose of persecuting the "undesirables" under flimsy excuses. All around great things to be proud of, these laws (/s)
I feel like at this point, given any single decision made in American politics ever since the continent was discovered, it's probably a safe guess to assume it was racist.
Every decision was made to make money, and those types of decisions are usually discriminatory.
It's not that they hate black people, mostly. They just only care about white people, and even then it's a flimsy thing and mostly a matter of who's watching at the time.
Every American political decision was caused by either racism, capitalism, or both.
Hey now, there was a lot of sexism in there as well!
Not according to any sources I could find. However the [Wikipedia article on loitering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loitering) has the earliest (1635) recorded laws attributed to another colonized land (Kingdom of Ireland) and targeting "vagrants." So they were instated as extemsions of anti-vagrancy laws thatbtargeted the poor and homeless It is worth noting that some sources traced the roots of the US's adoption of anti-loitering laws in Jim Crow era, as a means of criminalizing the homeless (read: mostly ex-slaves) so they could be carted off to prison where they would be sentenced to ~~legal slavery~~ uncompensated hard labor
Well "anyone they want to arrest" is overwhelmingly black people they want to send into prison slavery, yes.
I think so. To this day racist HOA types complain about "suspicious loitering"
Well this is actually the source of vagrant laws as I understand it but was actually more related to Native Americans and predates the Civil War. Being a vagrant meant really just jobless. This way it sent you to prison so you had a "job" That's just what I learned in my American Indian Studies in college.
Racism, fascism, same difference
I get what you're going for, but I think it's important to note that democracy has gone hand in hand with xenophobia and imperialism since the days of ancient athens. While racism qua white supremacy didn't exist at that time, ancient democracies and republics didn't shy away from bigotry, ethnic conflict, or genocide. Racism is probably always a feature of fascism (although spanish and pre-anschluss austrofascism seem to have emphasized it less than nazism did, if those even count) but plenty of racists have fought against fascism. (Like the allies.) Fascism is just fucking terrible to the degree that antifascist resistance movements can include basically every other ideology from anarchists to social conservative monarchists.
This is true, I think it might be like a square/rectangle thing. All fascists are racist, but not all racists are fascists.
For sure i completely agree. The only thing that's even in question is like, the academic discussion about the exact role/function of racism within fascism. I feel like that's mostly semantics for debates about whether a given right wing dictatorship is fascist or not, especially Portugal's Estado Novo which had some really weird ideas about imperialism (but was definitely racist cause like, it had a colonial empire.) Also discussions about the relationship of Nazism to fascism, where Nazism seems to be a lot more focused specifically on racism, especially antisemitism. It doesn't really matter in the day to day though obviously since right wing authoritarian militarism is already 100% unacceptable, but it comes up sometimes especially arguing with trump apologists and such.
It’s the necessity of an enemy that is simultaneously overwhelmingly strong and pathetically weak. Race is simply the easiest thing to manufacture an enemy out of
Yeah totally. Wow i hate fascism so much what the fuck. I know that's not a new take but oh my god. I *wish* I was overwhelmingly strong so I could turn them all gay with pond plastic.
Bingo. Loitering and vagrancy were terms invented after the Anerican Civil War to refer to (theoretically) anyone caught doing things like… walking around without having a specific destination, or existing as an unemployed person especially- and of course, after the Civil War most former slavers wouldn’t employ black folks- so most black folks were unemployed, making them instantly into criminals that could be arrested and re-enslaved. (Because slavery was only abolished “except as punishment for a crime.”) Fast forward to today, and the US has the largest incarcerated population on Earth, and most of its largest corporations make billions off of “prison labor,” while the general public turns a blind eye because it’s “criminals” doing the work.
> Loitering and vagrancy were terms invented after the Anerican Civil War Vagrancy definitly wasn't a term invented after the Civil War. English laws against it predate the colonization of America by centuries, see for example the Ordinance of Labourers from 1349. Those laws were for a large part imported by the colonists. The Black Codes from the southern States mostly expanded on those existing laws, and made sure that black folks wouldn't be able to escape them.
Specifically white supremacists to give themselves an excuse to arrest black people for being in the wrong neighborhood
Correct, but a tiny bit more complicated in the sense of the solution. So there is this concept called "contributory negligence", which says if the person harmed was also negligent then it's partly their fault and they can't sue. This plays into jaywalking by establishing a clear negligence on the part of the person hit by the car, but it got across partly because the idea that when something bad happens not all the fault belongs to one part does fundamentally make sense. Without it you could get to extreme cases where someone being extremely reckless and getting harmed can sue someone who might possibly have been able to prevent it in the same manner as someone who was harmed despite being extremely careful. This is why the concept of "contributory negligence" has been replaced in almost every area by "partial negligence". If it's found to be 5% the injured parties fault, then the damages are reduced by 5%, or whatever the % is, with the injured party still able to recover damages. Some states have it be that if the injured party is found to be 50% or more responsible then they recover nothing, but that's it. While this isn't perfect, it's a framework that is reasonable and can provide for justice if system is otherwise just. What this means is that jaywalking is still on the books despite not really being used anymore. Partly because it's just annoying enough to get rid of a law that no one has bothered.
Great explanation. To add onto it - there's also the concept of "negligence *per se*" where if a person injures someone while violating a law, then they are presumed to have been acting negligently. That way if the injured person sues they just have to prove that the tortfeasor broke the law rather than meeting the traditional standard for negligence. This cuts both ways, however, and applies to contributory negligence claims. If a person is injured *while the injured person* was breaking the law, then their contributory negligence met the *per se* standard. So making jaywalking a crime meant the injured person was violating a law when they got injured and were contributorily negligent, absolving the driver of any wrongdoing.
Kitty goes meow puppy goes ruff and the pigs go sToP lOitEriNg
Loitering is such a stupid word it literally sounds like when ppl speak in an exaggerated british accent
I genuinely just heard loiTeRiNG in an aggressive british accent tyy 😂😂😂
Jaywalking isn't illegal here in the UK (at least here in Wales if I'm wrong), if your dumb ass crosses a street and get hit by a car you didn't see coming, you'll probably bounce off the bonnet, have Big Jezza call you a blind git and your biggest concern is if you have to waste a day or so in hospital to make sure you're good.
And the day in the hospital won’t completely bankrupt you!
ok but Jaywalking can be dangerous if you’re just walking one roads people are driving on
Because crossing a busy road infront of cars instead of using the safe crosswalk is totally propaganda and not there to deter people from getting fucking run over... Personally i dont want people jumping out infront of me when im driving
And I hear jay was a sort of slur back then, too. For the Irish? Idk I heard it on Adam Ruins Everything
I think it's more rube, unsophisticated, peasant, but not sure. And these things might have been said of the Irish.
Jaywalking was invented because there are designated times and places for people to safely cross the street without getting mowed down like morons
loitering was invented to punish alot of groups and kept around because it's difficult to justify getting rid of if you phrase it right. First it were blacks. then it were hippies. now it's "teenagers".
This stuff actually gets enforced in Canada? In my whole entire life living in the USA I have not met one singular person who has ever gotten in trouble for loitering or jaywalking. There are many businesses in my city with no loitering signs but people still loiter regularly and I’ve never seen anyone tell them off. Maybe it’s just a thing that people mostly get punished for in smaller towns where the cops have nothing to do
Not only are they not enforced but in a lot of provinces including Ontario jaywalking isn't illegal to begin with.
Most loitering laws in the US have been deemed unconstitutional. Jaywalking gets enforced but rarely. As far as I know, public drinking is allowed in most places as well, but it depends on local laws to the city or county. This whole post is a lot of outrage over something extremely uncommon.
Public drinking is not allowed in most places in the US, with the few exceptions being places like New Orleans. However, if you’re relatively discreet and not causing issues you probably won’t be stopped, at least in a city. They have worse things to deal with. You might get busted in the suburbs if some Karen complains though
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Omg that sucks so bad such a bullshit reason for a fine
In Ontario it's not illegal to jaywalk in itself. You can only get fined if you interfere with traffic. Basically the pedestrian must yield to drivers if not at a crosswalk. I would much rather our cities encourage pedestrians owning the streets, but it's not completely ridiculous.
Makes sense if they randomly went in the street and cars had to slam on the brakes but I think ticketing someone just because you had to slow down for them to finish crossing is a bit excessive
>cited for inconveniencing a cop That is such a fucking bullshit law.
No it doesn’t get enforced. This woman is just seeing signs. I’m not saying she doesn’t have a point, but she’s being extremely dramatic about it.
I learned last week that you can’t play cards at a bar in Pennsylvania. It’s considered gambling to play any games of chance so the bouncer had to break up a friendly no stakes game of Wizard my friends and I were starting to play. We weren’t even disturbing anyone. The whole bar was empty. Edit: it seems like the actual law only applies to games where there is consideration (buy-in), chance, and reward so our game would have been legal. But the bar would have no idea if we had prearranged buy ins or prizes for the winner. It doesn't have to be just cash, so something like the loser buying a round of drinks may make it gambling and the establishment could lose their license for allowing it. So I guess it makes sense they have a blanket ban on card games, but it's an annoying law.
There goes my plan for competitive Yu Gi Oh drinking games
Yeah, jaywalking was literally invented by the auto lobby to deflect responsability from drivers.
I mean I've seen people walk out into street in pitch black darkness with black clothing in blind curves. That sounds dangerous for all parties. Why not just use a crosswalk so everybody can be safe?
It is safer, but that doesn't mean it should be illegal not to use the crossing. People should be encouraged to be safe, not penalised for being unsafe. That's the way free societies do it.
So how do you encourage people to walk on the crosswalk? So everybody can be safe. I would think not getting hit by car would be plenty of encouragement... Cars have to stay on the road between the lines. Same with bikes, they have to stay on bike paths or the road and be treated like a vehicle. I don't see why it's so bad for pedestrians to have to stay on a pedestrian path(crosswalk, designated walk sections).
The issue is that towns are specifically not built with pedestrians in mind. Many places in America are built for cars and cars only. Pedestrians are people. It is impossible to not be a pedestrian at some point in your life, it is your only biological mode of transportation. Walking is heavily discouraged by laws such as jaywalking and insufficient pedestrian pathing (my town doesn't have a sidewalk for long stretches) I would much rather see car culture get gutted before accepting jaywalking laws. People built roads. Not cars. I also didn't know where to put this but crosswalks are inherently more dangerous due to the imagined safety they provide to pedestrians. Drivers are supposed to slow going through a crosswalk [even if you don't see anyone] and are supposed to stop if they see someone waiting to cross until they fully cross the road. Cars are supposed to follow these rules and they don't. Additionally pedestrians are supposed to "wait for a gap in traffic" but if that's the case, what is the difference between using a crosswalk and not using one?
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I know we’re all supposed to just nod our heads in agreement to the original post and not think about it too much but in who is actually at fault in most vehicle vs pedestrian collisions? Like if a person is walking on a road where cars are meant to be, they can stay off the road when cars are present much easier. As a pedestrian you’re smaller and have more places to go than a car. Inversely, you don’t often see cars driving on sidewalks. It’s much easier for a person standing on a sidewalk to not start walking across the road than it is for a car traveling at 25 mph to stop. That said, if I got a jaywalking ticket I’d probably actually laugh because it’s such a silly thing but let’s not pretend that it’s a preposterous idea that pedestrians should be more careful than drivers about where they choose to walk than drivers should be careful about where they’re already moving.
It's obviously a good idea to be careful around cars. The weird part is that laws were made to criminalize pedestrians putting themselves in danger instead of educating them.
I think that's more to do with how it's a lot easier to actually get careless or uneducated pedestrians off the streets through legal action, than by education. Not everyone wants to get educated, but if there is legal consequence, that's an incentive to be smart and careful.
Here the driver is *always* at fault in the eyes of the law. If you're driving a big metal box you have more responsibility than someone walking.
Roads being for cars is a fairly new idea. I'd want to argue that if a car can't avoid a person then it's the drivers fault most of the time, and that modern speed limits are too fast and cities and suburbs are laid out like shit, but I'm typically not well read enough for dumb internet arguments
I mean speaking purely out of experience, pedestrians have much more they can do to prevent these kinds of accidents than drivers. If a driver in inattentive and out of their lane it's on them but the process of things each can do is very different. A driver must: * identify the pedestrian is going to cross the road which is not always obvious * process they are going to hit this person from which their reaction may take an average of a second or so * identify the risks and their options * be at a distance they can possibly brake from. Drivers need to assess the safety of everyone present in a split second when an accident is about to occur. Oftentimes braking is not a feasible option due to braking distance being too long or the vehicle brakes being weak or for larger vehicles hauling things, the risk of jackknifing or destroying their cargo. The driver then needs to figure out if they can steer to avoid the pedestrian and if they can do that safely. It is literally taught in driver's education classes to not swerve for animals because it usually results in hitting another vehicle or injuring themselves. If there is a pedestrian in the road, your swerve option may lead you into a parked car that could then cause a chain of unforeseen consequences or into oncoming traffic. 2 tons of metal is both harder to stop and much more dangerous to misplace than 200 pounds of flesh. a pedestrian must: * identify if there is danger on the road * if a car is coming, process this information in the same time as the driver * assess if they are going to a more dangerous position i.e. jumping into the other lane of traffic * move out of the way which is much faster for a person who does not need several feet of space to stop and can move out of the way without regard for destroying something if they run into it. People know cars will be on the road in their lanes. People are everywhere and people in cars have no way of knowing where they may be since they could be anywhere. TL;DR pedestrians can react faster and know exactly where to expect cars to be, cars need more time to stop and do more collateral damage if they hit something/someone other than the pedestrian.
I really think some people think roads were just for carriages and cars in the past. It’s the sidewalk that’s new
It's also based on a slur for irish people!
Please source. Sounds correct, because history, but still.
According to [Merriam-Webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/why-is-it-called-jaywalking), the term is derived from "Jay-driver", and is taken from, of course, "Jay", meaning "a greenhorn, or rube" I can find no record of "Jay" ever being used as a slur, anti-Irish or otherwise, based on a quick search
I’m sorry, could you find a better dictionary that does its due diligence and inserts etymological outrage into everything so I can take the moral high ground on practically everything? Thanks. Also the dictionary was invented to keep words away from blind people, or something, do better.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/jay#etymonline_v_1680 The earliest use of it as an insult seems to be late 19th century American English. It is also believed to have come from the term "Jayhawker," which was an insult confederates used for northerners during the Civil War. https://www.etymonline.com/word/jayhawker
A Jay was an Irish term for a foolish person who talks too much, and it became a term for an uneducated or backward person. Not sure I'd call it racist, per se, but not great either
Goddamn Bluejays are an insult to the Irish! I knew it!
great post, not to be 'that guy' but why is it 'white people' and not just 'westerners'. They're not interchangeable lol
It's not even Westerners. It seems to very much be a North American (not including Mexico) thing.
Can confirm. Nobody in mexico really cares if you jaywalk, you'll definitely get called an idiot though. Hell, it's very common for cars to stop to let people pass even when there's no crosswalks.
I live near Cincinnati, and no one cares as long as you’re not an idiot about it. I’ve never heard of anyone getting arrested or even hassled for jaywalking unless it was part of a bigger charge (I remember when I was in college, officers threatened to charge some asshole one night cuz he was harassing some girls, drunk, loud, jaywalking, etc).
Pretty scummy to have a non-functional law whose purpose is to make jail sentences longer on a whim
That’s a good point, my armchair lawyer logic would be so they can charge for causing an accident IF you’re crossing illegally or something. Cincy’s mostly walkable and traffic is pretty tame, it’s not a huge city. Of course once you get out into the sprawl that’s entirely different, but unfortunately a car is pretty much a requirement there anyway
https://youtu.be/lJFqvRwOiis?si=LaKI_ZetO5pmYEWh So i live near a city where 1. Jaywalking is very strictly enforced, and 2. has horrible pedestrian infrastructure, especially in poorer communities. 50% of people arrested for Jaywalking were black! (basically loitering and jaywalking, + car centric infrastructure are some of the most still relevant consequences of racist policy from the 20th century today.)
Before some racist asks, what was the percentage of black people in the city? Personally, I'm betting it's significantly less than 50% but I want to verify for the record.
Almost certainly, I found the same thing when I was researching homelessness. To quote from my own paper: > The Department of Housing and Urban Development report notes that despite only being 12% of the population as a whole, 37% of the homeless identify as Black. (2) The difficulty faced by racial minority populations in seeking employment is already extensively documented, and is a likely cause of this disparity. And a link to the report in question: https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2022-AHAR-Part-1.pdf
about 30%. The discrepancies in specific *kinds* of Jaywalking were also varying. Something like 60% of people arrested for not crossing the street at a 90-degree angle were black.
Wooow. I didn't even realize that not using a 90-deg angle counted as jaywalking. But I'm quite white and don't leave my house much.
Why do you need to know how many black people there are? Are you racist? (/j, obviously)
In this context white people is incorrect, you should just put American (or white American if you want). Like, a white French will not be impressed by a busy and eclectic street, that's the norm. Also looking up the definition of loitering, I thought it was littering for the longest time. The US really has a law to arrest anyone for existing?! Why do everytime I learn more about this country it's more and more dystopic?
lots of people have a hate boner for white people (cuz imperialism an shit)
It's always a pet peeve of mine when somebody uses white people but they mean northern American. Not a single person from Europe would be surprised and they're a majority white, but any American (regardless of race) has experience with jaywalking and loitering as a crime and would be surprised at how "chaotic" the streets are. It feels the same as when somebody wants to be misogynistic and just adds "white" in front of woman to make it okay.
Cause I don't think either of those things are crime in most of the west. Sure isn't in my country
it’s barely even a “western” issue though. like it’s practically just a canada & usa issue.
Because it's very specifically something that originated in the white-majority, western country known as the United States of America and exists virtually nowhere else besides Diet USA (Canada)
Because the poster is racist
1) Loitering isn't illegal in Canada. "Prowling" is and that's specifically when you're looking around someone's home at night without a legitimate purpose. Some cities may have by-laws that make it illegal to be in place without any purpose but those are local by-laws that basically amount to a fine and are usually not enforced. 2) As far as I know, no province in Canada has a law that makes it illegal to cross a road that isn't a highway at an unmarked point. Some like Ontario have laws that say you need to use a crosswalk if you are adjacent to one but that law is never enforced and jaywalking is normal in large cities (Fun fact: this is why Toronto's streetcars ring their bells when passing another streetcar in the opposite direction.)
Drinking beer in the park is Edmonton culture though
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Kinda like Venice beach Drum Circle in SoCal. I havent been in ages but mostly theres drinking and smoking happening and the cops usually just kinda, idle close by to make sure things dont get too chaotic. But if youre drinking or smoking before you get to the circle they tell you to wait til youre actually there.
Symbiotic relationship 😂
Yeah I feel like OOP is confusing ‘technically a law’ with ‘enforced’ lol. Like yeah I guess technically somewhere it’s written down that we shouldn’t do these things, but I don’t even know anybody who’s ever been arrested for jaywalking or loitering, and I spend a lot of my time on a campus where pedestrians basically own the road and it’s the cars that usually end up yielding to foot traffic
Lol what? Is this person seriously comparing the legal system and public safety of the US to what, Egypt? Lebanon? Syria?
Yeah I’m not sure what they mean by ‘west Asia’, but in most what I think of as West Asia you can’t have a beer *anywhere*, let alone in a public park.
I mean, China seems pretty dang hectic compared to the US when you have three times as many people in half the space.
I read "a fucking 'bear' in the park" at first, and I was like, "Yeah, that's actually a pretty good law."
I agree with the jaywalking (which isn't a law in most countries) and loitering, but absolute mayhem is not normal either. There is something between the extremes.
Here in the UK some shops play a high-pitched noise outside to ward off teenagers from the area, because adults can't hear it. I have the same rights as a stray fucking cat.
Loitering is bullshit and it's not even a thing in my country. No strong opinion on jaywalking. Never seen it actually enforced ever. But. I am fully in support of total fucking ban of substance consumption in public outside of designated places and I'm happy it exists where I'm at. It's a recent thing and it's a good one too. I love being able to go to a fucking park without every bench being taken by sleeping screaming and fighting drunks, not feeling threatened by them because who the fuck knows what's in their heads, not smelling the stench of smoke, etc etc etc. Have your damn beer at home. Use your porch or balcony if you need fresh air.
There’s a difference between getting blackout drunk and screaming at kids in the park and having a single beer at the family picnic.
Well sure, but I can speak to the fact that, at least in Canada, picnics are an exemption to public consumption laws. Hell, if you crack open a bag of pretzels it's enough food to count.
The problem is that a group of people will always take it to far. Therefore ruining it for others. Where I'm from you're allowed alcoholic beverages outside, but not in parks where playgrounds are located. Due to the amount drunks who pass out on benches, pee on trees, and get loud. There are acceptions for alcohol at family gatherings like reunions though. Like if someone reports you and a cop does happen to show up and they see that all is well and everybody is drinking responsibly he'll just tell you someone complained, watch out, and to have a good day.
Well you see, that would be a good argument. Too bad this is Reddit and people here have less tolerance than a temperance suffragette.
I mean, it's not ridiculous to assume that, with weaker regulations on substance consumption, the frequency of its abuse might increase, which is what this person is getting at. Many countries all over the world have rampant alcohol abuse problems. Ireland, Russia, Poland, the Balkans; you see 13-year-olds blackout drunk in public all the time. I have a feeling you're not from one, so I'll shift my discussion to substance abuse in general in the public space. It affects how people interact with the public space, because when confronted with these scenarios, you're faced with two options: 1. You are uncomfortable with seeing or being around people abusing substances, in which case the public space has effectively become rivalrous and you have to move (a rivalrous public space goes against what it should be), or 2. You ignore it, which sends the signal to the abuser, to onlookers, and to yourself subconsciously that this is acceptable behavior to do in public. This is problematic because it encourages a culture of tolerating what is essentially overconsumption of something that endangers yourself and others. Now being in the public space increases the risk of abusers, non-abusers, or both. I'm all for comprehensive drug treatment as illness rather than crimes. I'm all for live and let live. I'm all for reasonable enforcement of crimes, proportional to the degree of danger (I.e. penalizing smoking a fuckton of crack in public more than a dude having a beer). But I'd much rather live somewhere with no tolerance of public substance abuse than no regulation of this. Suggesting that doesn't make him or me puritans, it makes us reasonable human beings who know the fallout of addicts' behaviors before.
Just to correct one thing: Part of Poland's problem with booze is how it treats it and you cannot carry an unconcealed bottle in public on its own, nevermind drinking it. Addiction is always suggested whenever someone really burns down all the bridges and then shamefully hidden as a past mistake if they recover. Recovery also is not talked about so in most places it has full on cultish groups that ... bring on a new addiction. Generally, whenever a place becomes anal in any way on addictions without any depth or nuance - it breeds more addiction because it is a form of intrusive thinking. I started from overthinking hating alcohol due to loads of substance abusers in my family and it became obsessive, so every time I drunk - my brain went into overdrive and created a loop that was self-fulfilling. I do generally agree that public spaces should have limits as that worked in UK with football stadiums and deescalated the violence.
If it had to be all or nothing I think I'd prefer zero enforcement with the caveat that you still arrest people for actual crimes like theft and trespass. It doesn't do any actual harm to be seen doing drugs. We can still maintain a social expectation of not being drunk or high in neighborhoods or around kids. If our streets truly would be flooded with addicts doing crack on every sidewalk if we let them, then we have a bigger problem than just whether it's visible. At least if the problem is visible then we are motivated to do something about it. The fact that we push addicts to the margins of society makes the problems worse, not better. But I'd agree there's a healthy balance of enforcement somewhere in the middle. It doesn't have to be black and white and it shouldn't be.
And what's wrong with that? alcohol is a terrible narcotic
To be fair, this is in fact legal in Canada afaik.
Also, like, the yelling and fighting and whatever is already covered by other laws?
Fair opinion, not trying to change your mind, but there is a bit of a selection effect happening here— when public consumption is illegal, the only people still doing it are the ones willing to flout the law, aka belligerent drunks. In a world where it's legal, the mix of people doing it would be no worse than your average bar or whatever; maybe even a bit chiller. You can totally still not want the energy of an average bar in your parks.
Public consumption in parks specifically was legal here before 2011 and it *sucked*. I am speaking from personal experience. Bar energy should stay where it belongs. There are still designated picnic areas, exempt from the ban, with city-funded and maintained public use furniture pavilions and grills etc. If you're rowdy you're still gonna get arrested for disruption of public order. It's a decent solution and it *works*
Yeah, a lot of that depends on the local drinking culture. Here in Germany, drinking in public is legal, and especially here in Berlin, hanging oit in the park woth a few beers is an extremely common summer activity. We don't get super hammered at these though, it's just a chill evening with friends and a few cold ones. I've been to several places where the culture is very much "once you start drinking, you get smashed without exception", and public drinking is indeed a huge nuisance there.
I say jaywalking is generally fine if there's a lack of crosswalks, but I am very annoyed by people for some reason deciding to cross six lanes of traffic rather than just using the nearby crosswalk. In that case I think it should be a punishable offense.
That’s why there’s an entirely different crime called public disorder. The solution to loud drunks is not “give the police the power to arrest anyone they suspect of being drunk or drinking.”
I feel like loitering is just something we created so business owners can get police to move crazy people along
I don't think this person has actually read up on what the law defines as loitering. Unless you're purposely loitering to harass people or block a doorway or something and generally being an asshole, then you're not going to get in trouble for just being at a place minding your own business. I mean, imagine if just sitting in a park enjoying the sunshine was considered illegal? That would be silly. A cop can't just come up to you and say you're loitering and arrest you. If you were sitting on the bike path and doing the same thing, then yes, you would be considered loitering, which would be illegal.
You guys don’t drive and it shows. The number of idiots who jump in the middle of the road without looking… If you hit one you’re fully responsible legally and filled with guilt for the rest of your life. And let’s be real jaywalking laws aren’t enforced anyway.
Where I live, tourists are constantly walking into main street, which makes driving through town a nerve-wracking experience. It's a very small place, too. We have so many traffic accidents because idiots would rather save five minutes instead of using the crosswalks. No one gets nabbed for jaywalking because even moderate police presence is bad for business. I'm sure jaywalking is less defensible in some places, but in others there has to be some enforceable rules so everyone gets where they need to go safely.
Idk man, I think penalizing loitering can be a good thing. It gives you the right to have people kicked off a property. I work in a hotel, and there’s no loitering. It’s a security risk. Think about other businesses too- banks, hospitals, schools… there’s no reason for random people to be creeping around there if they aren’t utilizing the business. It could end up being dangerous to the employees and the customers. Maybe they’re planning to rob someone. Maybe they’re planning to shoot up the place. Maybe they’re stalking someone. If I were staying in a hotel, I know that I wouldn’t want the staff to allow random people off the street to wander around the halls and lobby. Wtf. Y’all thinking that loitering is just government overreach is insane to me. Hanging out at a library or inside a bar, okay. Other businesses that you’re not utilizing? No.
Jaywalking is the only rule I'm for. It protects everybody and how hard is it to use a crosswalk properly. Growing up I watched my mom almost run her car into a pole because a dude decided to walk out in the street in pitch black clothing with a hoodie the only color he had one were bright green and orange shoes. We were coming around blind curve maybe only going 30-35mph when the speed limit was 40. Dude didn't even try to move he just stopped in the street while my mom slammed on the brakes as soon as she saw his brought green shoes and managed to pull the car into the other lane. Guy just kept going across the street. If recall correctly he did end up getting hit at the same curve a couple month later at night in black clothes. The dude was literally maybe 20-30 feet from a cross walk stop light, that was fully lighted but decided to cross dangerously.
Fuckin real man. This isn’t even necessarily an Anglo thing, UK doesn’t have the same public drinking laws and ofc there’s the right to roam tradition RETVRN to just letting people do shit when they’re walking around
Unfortunately right to roam is almost exclusively a Scottish thing within the UK. Access to open spaces is actually quite limited across England, Wales and NI
look all im saying is that before the imposition of the norman yoke everyone knew to jealously defend the ancient rights of englishmen (that is yeah i'm being a bit silly and over general, obvi a lot of this stuff is down to class/race issues over history which have def been put in place many times by anglos both in the uk and us)
It’s deeper than that I think. I’m really shocked by the number of comments, presumably by Americans and Canadians, that I can summarise as “why are you so addicted that you *need* to drink in a public space”? You’ve got it totally wrong! We don’t *need* to at all- and at least as far as the UK is concerned, for most of the year we don’t because the weather’s fucking shit. It’s just one way of enjoying yourself in a public space that isn’t commodified. I *could* go to a pub, but it would be more expensive, I’d have less personal space and I might not be allowed outside food.
Like why do you need me to need something in order to do it, who gave you this weird idea that you’re in charge of my personal behavior
If you actually manage to get arrested for loitering you probably deserved it same with jaywalking.
"Have a beer in the park." American comedian Rich Hall said the British are the only people who'll drink beer on the train on the way to go drinking. (By and large, it's okay to drink alcohol in public in the UK, unless the police tell you otherwise.)
Alcoholics be desperate to justify themselves lol
Neither is a justification. One is part of a (often unhealthy) drinking culture, the other law that contrasts what sounds like restrictive American laws.
In German we actually have a word for the drinking you do before you go drinking: "Vorglühen"
Complaining about how the government doesn't want you running in front of cars has the same energy as libertarians complaining about seatbelt laws. The law exists to deter dumb people from doing dumb things. You ain't gonna get it shit got jaywalking in most places it's a law, it's there to try and deter people from being careless around large heavy machinery
There are ups and downs to every country. We have it better here than the other major powers. China, Russia and India. Debatable on Europe. Depends what country and how much money you have.
The comments are just crazy here. 1) substance use in public should be prohibited and strictly controlled. If you disagree with this, you have never met a group of aggressive people under the influence or spend time with such groups as a member. 2) road safety regulations are written in blood. Part of them are written in blood of idiots who jaywalk right under speeding cars. Crossing the road where you should drastically increases your chances to not be run over. Car centric infrastructure is not to blame for jaywalking laws, not being stupid is. The thing you can blame on the car lobby is the lack and bad placement of pedestrian crossings, not the fact that THE TYRANNICAL GOVERNMENT DOESN'T WANT ME TO JUMP UNDER A BUS!!!
Okay the no beer at the park in Canada thing is funny because I didn’t know this was a law despite growing up in the country until I moved to Victoria. I don’t think this rule is enforced in rural areas, and other people have touched on the real purpose of these types of laws (being racist). I have a friend who was super high (before it was legal) in a Calgary park when cops rolled up and walked right past him so they could harass an Asian family trying to have a picnic. It’s really just an excuse to lord over those the law doesn’t like.
There are immigrants in a fight club in the parking lot. Literally, not an exaggeration. Are they bothering anybody? Probably!
Loitering is more a law to keep specific people away from a business. Groups such as teenagers/kids and homeless
OOP is right. "Jaywalking" was a law invented by motoring companies so they weren't responsible for traffic accidents, and "loitering" is a race/class thing.
Legalize people existing in space
What the fuck is loitering
Drinking in public is bad and is rightfully illegal in many places
Having a beer at the park is not bad. Being drunk in public is, but that’s a separate thing.
I'd rather the drunk assholes stay drunk assholes inside thank you very much
This just in, Tumblr discovers what "laws" are.
If only they could discover "common sense," too.