The Rumpus.net » Steven Church

On Loitering

Steven Church — Thu, 16 May 2013 07:13:58 +0000

In Charles Moore’s iconic black-and-white photograph, Coretta looks on stoically, lips parted, hands clasped in front as her husband, Martin Luther King, has his right arm bent behind his back by a police officer in a tall hat. Someone unseen, outside the frame, places a hand on Coretta’s left arm, as if to comfort or contain her. Martin pitches forward over a counter, leaning to his right, his left hand splayed out for support on the polished surface. He wears a light colored suit and tie, a panama hat with a black band. The force of the officer’s grip has nearly yanked the jacket off his right shoulder. The officer’s left hand pushes against Martin’s left side, bunching up his jacket, shoving him forward, bending him over the counter. Another officer stands behind Martin’s right shoulder, but you can only see the top of his hat and his right arm resting casually on the counter. A hatless white officer stands behind the counter and our perspective peers over his right shoulder into Martin’s face. He doesn’t look pained. Resigned perhaps, sadly familiar with this sort of treatment. The man behind the counter seems to be reaching out with his left hand to take something or give something (a piece of paper perhaps) from Martin as his right arm blurs at the bottom edge of the frame. Martin, his eyes pulled all the way to the right, is either looking at the man behind the counter or at someone else we can’t see. The date is September 3, 1958 in the Montgomery, Alabama county courthouse. Martin Luther King Jr. is there to support his longtime friend, Ralph Abernathy, a Baptist minister testifying in the trial of a deranged man charged with chasing Abernathy down the street with a hatchet. In the photo, King has just been arrested for loitering. He will spend fourteen days in jail as punishment for his crime. The strange thing is that in Moore’s photograph it is not Martin or Coretta who look afraid. It’s the policemen who appear flustered and scared. The photo is superficially silent. But you can still see how blurry with fear they are of his power and presence, quivering before his radical subjectivity in that space.

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Loitering is not particularly difficult or physically demanding. It doesn’t, at first blush, appear revolutionary or even criminal. Consider that “loiter” is an intransitive verb. There is no object to it. It is all subject and subjectivity. To loiter requires simply that you stand around or sit aimlessly, without purpose, to choose a space because it happens to be in the shade, or just happens to be there. Anywhere. The key to pure loitering—the most honest embodiment of the word’s spirit—is of course to do nothing. Absolutely nothing.

But it has become bigger than that. Revolutionary. To do nothing now in the name of loitering is also to repurpose in the name of purposeless an otherwise purposed space. And we are surrounded by purposed spaces. To loiter then is a kind of zen-like appropriation, a subjective possession of objective, though often marginal space; and perhaps this is enough to make it revolutionary, enough to threaten those who are invested in the purposing or owning of such space. It worries us when someone does nothing, even when they seem to be doing nothing on a street corner, a roadway median, an alley or some other marginal space. We’re so busy, so purposeful; and in our world of increasing technological connection, we’re always engaged in some activity. It’s hard for us to understand the nothingness of loitering.

Part of the trouble is that it is nearly impossible to define “doing nothing” from “doing something,” so people who truly loiter assume a kind of vague, dangerous amorphous potentiality. The ambiguity of their physical and moral position frightens us. After all, when is any one of us actually doing nothing in any space? Have you ever truly done nothing?

Even when I putter around my yard or sit on my front porch, thinking about whatever I’m currently writing or reading, aren’t I still doing something, even if that something is only thinking? I’m still using the space with an intent that seems to fit the space. I wonder how long I could loiter on my street corner, just stand around thinking and watching people and traffic without drawing unwanted attention to myself. I wonder if that time would be different if I lived in a wealthier, gated community on the North side of town, one of those places where they don’t really have street corners. What if I just stood around in the middle of a cul-de-sac? Or if I lived in a more poverty-stricken, gang-controlled neighborhood in a different part of town would my loitering embody a different potentiality? Of course it would. The objective nothingness in my loitering allows my subjectivity to be shaped to the expectations of the context.

Loitering then as an idea is as undefined, abstract, and subjective as happiness or suffering. It can be adapted and appropriated, shaped to fit the situation; and then laws or ordinances or signs that attempt to regulate loitering are the ontological equivalent of ordinances regulating or controlling happiness or suffering. They are perhaps the most common legislative manifestations of the conflict between subjective intent and attempts at objective measurement of said intent.

Sometimes I think about this when I visit the Food King market in my neighborhood, a subjectively happy place, a true neighborhood convenience store. It feels like home to me. I don’t even care that it costs me nearly twenty dollars for two six-packs of beer. The brothers, Mo and Najib, who own the Food King, emigrated to the U.S. from Yemen and are exceedingly nice to me, always calling me by name. They know most of their customers by name; sometimes Najib’s bespectacled son sits behind the counter working on his homework. Mo and Najib often talk about the weather and they’re usually listening to NPR on the radio. But they also have prominent “No Loitering” signs posted on the front of the store and a bank of video monitors that allow them to keep and eye on every part of their property. You have about as much time to linger in front of the Food King as you do in front of an airport. Pause too long and you will be hustled along.

Mo and Najib have to deal with challenges I can barely imagine. Fresno is a dangerous place filled with desperate people. Nobody really denies this reality. We just live with it. But Mo and Najib run a tight ship, more than most places. They keep their store clean and free of the crowds that loiter around elsewhere. They never hesitate to chase off the street-kids and panhandlers, the tweakers or the prostitutes; and I have to admit that I appreciate this, that it makes me feel somewhat safer as a consumer.

When I asked Mo one day about his “No loitering” signs and how he enforces the rule, he told me that he just tells any loiterers to move along, and if they don’t move, he might threaten to call the police.

“But would they come?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure. Maybe. But if you just mention the police, they mostly move along.”

“And if they don’t?”

“If they don’t, I take my stick out there and I tell them I’m gonna count to three and then I’m gonna hit you with this stick.”

Mo didn’t show me his stick but I guessed it was some kind of baton. I didn’t doubt his conviction. Mo meant business. To him the issue was all black-and-white, no gray area, no room for interpretation. This was his property, his Food King, and he was in charge of defining loitering in this subjective space. He also told me he had a gun under the counter if it came to that.

The Food King. Fresno, CA 2013

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Perhaps the most extreme example of the threatening potentiality of loitering is in the context of an elementary school, an exaggeratedly purposed and morally charged public space. If you stand around outside the playground fence of a school, just stand there long enough, most likely your loitering will be seen as a threat and you will most likely be confronted by authority figures. In Fresno all the schools are surrounded by six-foot chain-link safety fencing. If you’re loitering around a school, regardless of your intent (maybe you’re studying the architecture of schools for a class) you might be arrested or at least just hassled and hustled along. There are signs posted everywhere forbidding all manner of activities, including dog walking, golfing, model-airplane flying, and loitering; and as a parent of elementary school children, I’m glad to see those signs when we take our dog there for walks. I don’t really care if you’re flying model-airplanes at my daughter’s school, but I do care if you’re loitering there. It doesn’t matter to me if you’re innocently researching something for a novel or an essay, maybe snapping photos with your IPhone, I just want you to move along and take your subjectivity elsewhere. An elementary school is a place where the objective truth of the context overwhelms the subjective truth of anyone who moves through the space. Your rights are necessarily limited there, and it doesn’t end at the fence. The rights-defining power of an Elementary School space extends well beyond the fences, past the sidewalks, into the streets, where the rules of driving are more stringent and more morally charged, and even further beyond into surrounding neighborhoods, where legal penalties for things like narcotics trafficking are increased. In such spaces the objective meaning of the place overwrites your subjective intent.

Hamilton Elementary School, Fresno, CA 2013

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It is also the vague undefined nature of loitering combined with the impossibility of truly knowing or measuring subjective intent that has allowed anti-loitering laws and ordinances to be used as a weapon against civil disobedience. Martin Luther King was arrested because anti-loitering laws on the books in Montgomery allowed the police, regardless of the facts of that day, to define King’s presence, to shape his intent into something criminal, something they could use to control him. He was just attending a public trial. But anti-loitering laws allowed the police to arrest him for being black in a white space.

Attempts to criminalize loitering have been used more recently to try and control gang activity, drug sales, panhandling and prostitution, as well as to control populations of homeless people and protesters in the nationwide “Occupy” movement. These efforts, though often temporarily successful, are often doomed to failure, perhaps because of the very nature of loitering itself. Courts have recognized that anti-loitering laws often encourage racial profiling and police abuse of marginalized groups. Legislating loitering is like legislating nothingness.

In February 2012, New York City settled a class action lawsuit brought on behalf of thousands of citizens arrested over the years on anti-loitering charges that had been deemed unconstitutional. The city’s efforts to control loitering over a span of thirty years will ultimately cost them fifteen million dollars and require them to expunge thousands of arrests and convictions. There is little evidence to suggest, however, that this will change the way anti-loitering laws and ordinances are used to control marginalized populations in this country. We are simply too purposed and possessive of our objective spaces, too frightened by the potential of loiterers.

In other communities, perhaps due to the challenges of defining and enforcing anti-loitering ordinances, business owners are turning to less obviously confrontational, more passive, subjective, and subliminal deterrence methods. They’re turning to sound warfare as a way to avoid the whole messy enterprise of objectively measuring and legislating against subjective intent. Perhaps they’re doing this because it protects them from images of abuse and violence and the cultural resonance created by such pictures.

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The Mosquito was invented in Wales several years ago.

Moving Sound Technologies has been marketing and selling the Mosquito throughout North America. Many cities, municipalities, school districts, and parks boards use the Mosquito to combat vandalism

The patented Mosquito is a small speaker that produces a high frequency sound much like the buzzing of the insect it’s named after. This high frequency can be heard by young people 13 to 25 years old.

The latest version of the Mosquito is called the MK4 Multi-Age. It has two different settings one for teenagers 13 – 25 years and one setting for all ages.

When it is set to 17KHz the Mosquito can only be heard by teenagers approximately 13 to 25 years of age.

When set to 8 KHz the Mosquito can be heard by all ages.

In case you thought Mosquito is all about annoying sound that would force the loiterers to run for cover you would be in for a pleasant surprise!

The Music Mosquito is a complete music system that will relay Royalty free Classical or Chill-out music that would keep the teenagers away to some extent.