The racist history of loitering laws

"Loitering may not seem like a big deal, but when you see black people getting arrested for waiting in a Starbucks, or choked for selling cigarettes on a street corner, you're looking at the racist history of loitering laws at work. ... [I]n some places, Black people are from three to 10 times as likely to be arrested for low-level offense like loitering than their white counterparts."

• What Is Loitering, Really? (An quick overview of loitering, including a brief history, variations on "loitering" as a vague, arrestable offense, plus examples of arrests and grassroots efforts to end loitering laws. Despite its brevity, it's a thorough explanation.)

• Punishment for loitering, a "Black Code" violation, was used by post-Civil War plantation owners as a way of acquiring forced laborers. "'[Black codes'' were being enforced by white militia groups, the Ku Klux Klan, vigilantes, and, of course, an entirely white and newly established system of modern policing." With the formal end of segregation, anti-loitering laws were still in place. They were more specific, yet "vague enough that 'concerned citizens' could continue to call the authorities on people of color for arbitrary reasons while in public ." [Source]

• Laws regarding vagrancy — lacking a permanent job, home, or material resources — and loitering have existed in America for more than a century. According to a 2020 piece by The Week, states during the Jim Crow era passed laws that made it a crime not to work and then selectively enforced those laws against the recently freed Black population. Soon came loitering laws, which criminalized “strolling about in idleness” and were also enforced overwhelmingly against Black people. These laws, while not expressly discriminatory, gave police pretexts to stop, harass, or ultimately arrest Black individuals for the crime of existing freely in the public sphere. [Source]

• Because of their vagueness, vagrancy laws were often used as a "go-to response against anyone who threatened, as many described it during vagrancy laws’ heyday, to move 'out of place' socially, culturally, politically, racially, sexually, economically, or spatially." That vagueness made these laws multi-purpose. In one noteworthy incident, a white woman named Margaret “Lorraine” Papachristou was arrested while driving at night with three companions. The specific charge was "prowling by car," but it's widely accepted that her real crime was being in a car with two Black people. It was 1971. [Source]

• At worst, "[t]he concept of vagrancy, including loitering, as a criminal offense was also used by racist vigilantes to justify lynching." The 2020 murder of Ahmaud Arbery is an egregious example of civilians acting on their suspicion that a young Black man, out for a jog, was loitering. "[T]he idea of loitering as a threatening act by African-American men remains embedded in our culture." [Source] (Depending on the source, Arbery's murder is often referred to as a lynching. Personally, I agree.)

• Today, “loitering ordinances are more than archaic holdovers from a more-racist time. Today, as then, these indefensible laws are deployed for the profit of some at the expense of others. The original Jim Crow anti-loitering restrictions were written to coerce labor from Black people. Those standing around unproductively, neither shopping nor working, were criminalized, incarcerated, and forced into a convict leasing system that rented them out to private businesses (The Week). Present-day loitering laws have their beneficiaries, too: shopkeepers who want their businesses surrounded by only affluent potential consumers, homeowners who don’t want their property values lowered by their unhoused neighbors, and bigots who would be offended by the presence of the oppressed, whether people of color, the unhoused, youth, women, or gender non-conforming people.?” [Source]

Racist enforcement of loitering laws continues

As a matter of casual overview, articles about loitering take three different approaches. There’s the legalistic, security-based view: “Loitering bad, most stop it.” Alternately, a Bloomberg article explains how to loiter the right way. Then, there are humanistic views, with authors who explain why anti-loitering laws are so discriminatory.

The third approach is more specific, exploring the harm to specific demographic groups: Young people, homeless people, sex workers, and, sometimes, Black people. (For that matter, Black people are seldom included in the second category. And no, Bloomberg didn’t think to offer any Black-specific advice, either. And yet, they are invariably subject to more arrests than any other group.)

In keeping with my topic, the following articles are about the last demographic, because — as noted above — being “Black while (fill in the blank)” becomes dangerous when their “crime” is loitering.

• “It was after midnight when Georgia cops spotted a Black man doing his job by sweeping the exterior of a business in a strip shopping mall and arrested him for loitering and prowling after he refused to identify himself – which was his constitutional right considering officers had no reasonable suspicion he had committed a crime in the first place. The charge was dismissed several hours later when a lieutenant reviewed the arrest report and told officers they must release him because it was an unlawful arrest. [As of Jan. 14, 2025,] his mugshot, however, is still posted online as if the charge is still pending.” [Source]

• “‘We Just Came Home!’ Black Philly Family Feels Targeted After Police Arrest Them Two Days In a Row for ‘Loitering’ on Their Own Property.” During the arrest, police used a taser on one victim. It didn’t end there, either. “Some family members were even arrested twice in two days for doing nothing more than standing outside of their house, they told CBS Philly.” [Source]

• In Minnetonka, MN, a Black man named Frederick was arrested while trying to visit a friend. “A half hour before midnight, a woman called police to say she believed someone was breaking into her apartment on Cedar Hills Boulevard. The woman gave no description of the suspected burglar and when police called her back, she didn't pick up her phone. When police looked for her later, she couldn't be found.” All the same, on their arrival at the apartment building, police saw, ‘at a distance, a tall black male walking towards the southwest corner of the parking lot.’ It was Frederick, who “had been dropped off at a nearby gas station and was coming to see his friend Heather. … [B]ecause Frederick was unable to dispel alarm and because [a misdemeanor petty theft warrant] made him appear suspicious, officers decided to arrest Frederick.” [Source]

• As loitering and curfew arrests decline nationwide, Philadelphia's use of the tactic stands out. “According to data voluntarily reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) by thousands of city and county police departments around the country, the Philadelphia Police Department reported arresting more young people for loitering and curfew violations than any other city in the United States from 2016 to 2018. Even as their overall number of loitering and curfew arrests declined each year, Philadelphia police still arrested 15,552 people — all of them juveniles — for those offenses over that three-year period, 10 times more than Nashville, which reported arresting the second most people. In 2018, Philadelphia accounted for nearly 1 in 4 loitering arrests nationwide. The analysis of those arrests, conducted by ABC News in collaboration with ABC-owned stations, reveals a stark racial disparity. About 42% of Philadelphia’s population is black; about 63% of people arrested for all crimes throughout the city were black; but about 85% of arrests for loitering and curfew violations were made against young black people.”

• “When you have laws … that criminalize ordinary conduct -- waiting for a bus or hanging around talking to friends on a street corner -- it gives police a wide amount of discretion, which leads to arbitrary enforcement, which leads to discriminatory enforcement.“

• In Newark, NJ, a 2015 ACLU study reveals:, “Black people were 9.6 times more likely to be arrested than White people in Jersey City in 2013 for low-level offenses such as loitering, possession of small amounts of marijuana, trespassing, and disorderly conduct, according to a study (PDF) released today by the ACLU of New Jersey. This extreme racial disparity was not unique to the state’s second largest city. Data for the most recent years available revealed disparities in low-level arrests in the three other municipalities studied – Millville, where Blacks were 6.3 times more likely to be arrested; Elizabeth, 3.4 times; and New Brunswick, 2.6 times. Disparities in the number of arrests between Hispanics/Latinos and Whites also were significant, where data were available. Not all of the departments tracked ethnicity in their arrest data.

  “‘The data reveal a clear pattern of communities of color disproportionately bearing the brunt of police practices that target low-level offenses,‘ said ACLU-NJ Executive Director Udi Ofer. ‘In Black and Latino communities, New Jerseyans are arrested for minor misbehavior at a much greater rate than in White communities. Unlike more serious crime, where there is a victim or some form of property damage, low-level offenses rest primarily on a police officer’s discretion to arrest for behavior that poses little or no harm to the community. The discretionary nature of these arrests creates ample opportunity for arbitrary and unfair enforcement of the law.”

• In New York, loitering for prostitution was illegal until 2021, but the statistics are still worth noting: “The loitering law was labeled the ‘Walking While Trans law’ because of the obvious prejudice that saw Black and Latinx women, especially trans women, make up 91% of arrests.” (Nationwide, data shows “that Black people … make up 42% of all prostitution arrests while being only 13.2% of the population.)” [Source]

• California repealed a similar law in 2022 when it enacted SB357. The bill’s author, State Senator Scott Wiener, noted that “someone just standing on the sidewalk wearing tight clothes and high heels could be arrested on the assumption that they were going to engage in prostitution. He says those arrested were predominantly Black and Brown women and trans women — so much so that the law was called ‘the walking while trans law.’” [Source]