So why were loitering laws introduced? I doubt it was purely a sadistic effort to ruin the lives of kids.
My guess is that combatting gang crime was a major reason.
So why were loitering laws introduced? I doubt it was purely a sadistic effort to ruin the lives of kids.
My guess is that combatting gang crime was a major reason.
Modern loitering laws in small-town America, post-Civil-War, were typically originally intended to enslave the entire population of black men remaining in town, or otherwise drive them out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA It took most of a century for the economy to really convert everything over to an hourly-pay model. This is not the only reason, but it is the dominant, proximate one that enshrined the practice.
Places with less black-white racial animus were comfortable adopting animus for other minorities, or for the poor in general. Post-Civil-Rights, loitering laws (and a panoply of other practices ranging from swimming pools to mortgage approvals to cul-de-sacs) were exploited not to enslave, but principally to simply eject categories of people.
For a take on the origins of the Anglo cultural tradition of persecuting the poor in general, this goes a lot further back - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ec9Al5ezYs
My understanding is that loitering laws are much older than that - the first versions of these laws seems to date to 1342 [1].
IMO what all these laws have in common is that they're designed to allow the police to legally ask questions to people (or straight up remove them) who look suspicious but haven't committed any crime. Why would anyone want to remove people who haven't done anything wrong is a more nuanced question that I'm not qualified to properly answer.
[1] https://eji.org/news/visual-history-loitering-laws/
Have an unmarked "free candy" type van park across your street from your house day in and day out, moving with just enough regularity to avoid parking too long, and you might begin to understand why "look suspicious but haven't committed any crime" starts to weird people out.
There's an inherent tension between protecting public spaces and protecting vulnerable but disruptive people.
Your link refers to an article which is very American and very 2018. Lots of large font size headings about race and sexuality and gender. I don't think it's a productive take on how to manage the tension. Racially homogenous societies still need to decide how to handle people who try to sleep at train stations and yell at the commuters.
Sleeping at train stations is fine (as is sleeping on trains), and yelling at commuters is disruptive / antisocial behaviour. (I don't like the word "antisocial" in laws, because it's too open to interpretation, and then you have a load of case law defining what precisely "antisocial" means, known only to legal experts, leaving everyone else ignorant of the law.) It seems to me that additional rules against loitering are not useful for the situation you described.
Why is sleeping at a train station fine? (Unless you're talking about infrequent long distance trains).
Trains are transportation infrastructure. Drivers don't have to put up with people setting up a queen bed in the middle of their lane on the highway. If a country doesn't protect its public transport infrastructure, then the rich and the middle class stop taking the train, the poor have to put up with things, and the mentally ill get an overpriced and noisy mobile homeless shelter. One that costs more and helps less than crisis accommodation.
Loitering laws have existed since english commonlaw, but in the modern era were adapted to penalize homelessness, unemployment, etc...
A reason I suspect (though, truly it is only a guess) is as a way to force people to spend money. Something akin to "either buy something or leave" to try and capture just that tiny bit of additional revenue.
"Buy something or leave" has become a kind of sinister, unwritten, yet overarching principle organizing and governing everyone's lives. Participation in the work-earn-spend economy has become less and less optional with each passing day.
I'm not sure that's actually true in a typical park. It may very well be true for a bunch of noisy kids in a shopping mall which exists and is paid for for the purpose of people, well, shopping.
have you looked at satellite maps of the US? there are plenty of places that are concrete jungles with little green space.
Its to drive homeless people away, shamefully enough