A widespread law specific to the USA that doesn't seem to be a thing anywhere else in the world. We can take beers to a picnic in our parks. Shocking i know. Other societies haven't collapsed from allowing this.
To be very fair, I do not know a single person who has ever been charged with this. I and all my friends drink in the park all the time and the cops don't seem to care. If I get on a crowded bus, odds are good that there's a homeless man with a brown paper bag.
This law is probably only enforced against businesses selling booze or people who are being a nuisance.
One problem with this is that it now ends up being at the discretion of the officer to decide whether to charge you, so it is up to their biases and beliefs whether you are indeed “friends drinking in a park” or “being a nuisance”.
> I do not know a single person who has ever been charged with this.
My parents were charged with this soon after coming to the US - they brought a bottle of wine to a barbecue at a public park; the bottle wasn't even kept in view, but presumably some busybody still noticed and called the police.
Having unenforced laws on the books ought to be considered like a “dead code” bad smell. And this dead thing reeks. As others have mentioned, selective enforcement falls on whoever the cops feel like hassling.
Well in the case of drinking there is a spectrum of acceptable behavior an observer would clearly determine but a law would struggle to formally define. You could say your drinking shouldn’t be a “nuisance” in the law but that is just as subjective as the current situation.
The difference is that crimes such as disorderly conduct are subjective not just for police, but also for juries. It's not perfect, but twelve people agree that you were causing trouble at a level that rises to criminality, there's a good chance there's something to it. With open container laws, it's only subjective for the police. Once you're charged, then all they have to prove about your conduct is that you had an open drink, not the real reason they decided to go after you.
Yes, but the jury will be asked to decide the question of whether the accused had an open container, of which there will be little doubt.
A jury could decide that it's a case of selective malicious prosecution and acquit the accused despite believing them to have committed the crime, but that's uncommon and a much bigger reach than a jury weighing whether the accused was engaged in disorderly conduct because they're charged with disorderly conduct.
They are considered that, but people are lazy and, at most, will leave a quip about it on an Internet forum, but certainly won't put in the effort to clean up where there is no apparent consequences to leaving the status quo intact.
the brown paper bag is specifically due to the open container law.
if you are drinking from a bag, an officer must look into the bag to know you are drinking alcohol. looking into the bag requires probable cause and a 4th amendment protected search.
I always thought it's strange how it would be considered very Australian to go to the beach or have a beer, but completely illegal to have a beer at the beach.
I remember walking through a neighborhood in Sweden, in the town of Örebro, with a tallboy beer. I was there on an extended work trip, but had met some friends in town who invited me to social gatherings. So they said let's go to the club, we can take these drinks to go it's no problem. I assumed it was fine, since there seems to be much more tolerance and acceptance of this in Europe.
As we were walking down the road... a Volvo police car comes screaming towards us, lights and sirens going. It stops and - arguably one of the most beautiful police officers I have ever seen - approached me and started to speak in Swedish. I apologized and said sorry I do not speak Swedish, I am a visitor from the US. She chuckled and said, "Your friends are not being honest with you - you cannot drink this on the street - please pour it out". Then as quick as she stopped, she said, "We are hunting for a a shooting suspect, gotta go" and jumped back in and left.
It was the most "American" European experience I have ever had. So we can't drink on the street? And a shooting has happened? Wild.
I’m going to presume that “We are hunting for a a shooting suspect, gotta go” is what they are taught in police training to say to an American when they have to leave.
There is no evidence available that will ever change my mind.
In NYC esp from Chelsea to the Village you literally can't get away from the smell of weed, even indoors, as the ventilators will suck it in. I don't terribly mind, but some people really don't like it. If it was a glade plugin, I'd lose my mind, now that is a chemical weapon.
All three things were illegal. All three things were frowned upon.
What you are actually saying is that there are many people on the streets of San Francisco who are otherwise excluded from American society and therefore have almost 'nothing to lose.' Those people often break laws, largely because the social contract has excluded them from the benefits of society (for example, knowing you have access to indoor plumbing).
This article is about a change for the fortunate ones like you and me who do feel like we get a fair shake from the social contract and therefore follow most laws (I assume).
The complaint is that laws are structured in a way that only affect people who have something material to lose. There's no law of nature that says laws have to be that way, and, historically and cross-culturally, they haven't been.
Upgrading my windows to be double-paned without city approval should not result in a greater punishment from the government than attacking someone on the street.
> Upgrading my windows to be double-paned without city approval should not result in a greater punishment from the government than attacking someone on the street.
I agree with the statement if you mean that you should be punished more for the latter than for the former. But if you mean that you should be punished less for X and someone else should be punished more for Y (where Y is a greater crime than X), there simply are not enough details to know if I agree. I might think that you should be punished more when you are in a position to profit from the actions and therefore be more willing to continue despite the punishment (e.g. a restaurant owner refusing to make up the minimum wage difference for a server who didn't make enough in tips) whereas the other person committed their crime from opportunism in a desperate situation (e.g. a homeless person who robbed an unfortunate individual for money, including causing some minor injuries). If the same person were to commit both crimes, obviously the latter is worse; if different people commit the crimes, I'd be interested to know more about the perpetrators if I was asked to pass judgement.
> The complaint is that laws are structured in a way that only affect people who have something material to lose.
This is how it should be. Society should be structured such that every member of it has something material to lose.
I am really trying to understand what you're saying, but I disagree because I do think that today it is axiomatic that laws need enforcement to be useful and most legal enforcement involves negative consequences. I also thing that most negative consequences are either pain related (Contemporary morals have generally eradicated pain-based consequences) or restriction on access to material things.
What I am ultimately trying to say is that the large majority of people on this forum see the symptom of a broken society (homelessness and drug addiction) and for whatever reason, refuse to believe that a complex network of problems is actually the thing that should draw our 'hacker' focus.
Like sure, you clearly had a negative experience with permitting that caused you to have an expensive fine and feel resentment that other people do 'worse' things 'scot-free'.
Would fining a homeless person more money actually solve your or the city's problems? No. The person would just not pay, because again, they have nothing to lose.
Ultimately, I think where we agree is that the idea of law needs to evolve to include both punishment and state funded / enforced humanitarian care.
The reason that I think this will never happen in America is because we are an inherently vengeful people with a dark history of race-based hatred and a fundamental disdain for paying taxes that fund public goods.
You can drink in public already. If you aren’t trying to start fights or look like a drunken teenager cops could care less what is in your hand or in the coozie. Some beaches being the exception but really you can drink all over today right now and not suffer for it.
Seeing someone openly injecting themselves with something was not an uncommon sight within a few blocks of Valencia when I used to work in the neighborhood.
Also poop on sidewalks.
It was wild how the vibe changed over the course of 2 or 3 blocks towards or away from Valencia.
Crazy how $350,000/yr residents will look at that and say "the city is the problem" and "get these homeless shelters out of my neighborhood" as a reaction.
In that general area it's more people living in tents on the sidewalk as the cause.
But yeah, SF handles homeless issues poorly and spends a tremendous amount of money doing it. And you don't have to be a "get those people out of my sight and that's all I care about them" kind of person to think that SF has been doing a bad job.
Part of the problem of handling homelessness is that the better you are at helping them, the more visible homelessness there will be.
I live in Texas, we're typically very hostile to homeless people in our cities. We have anti-panhandling signage everywhere, spikes under overpasses, anti-homeless benches, very few shelters, and we arrest homeless people for panhandling all the time.
The result is that the city appears to not have that many homeless people. But they're all pushed to specific overpasses and highways where they can live without persecution. Many, I'm sure, either move to cities that better accommodate them or die.
Point being, if I was homeless, I'd want to be SF. Not Euless.
Everyone I know coyly drinks in the park in embarrassingly obvious ways. HB 1515 sounds like great news, but it is just a carve out for a specific event. At least they wrote it down and didn't just say, hey LCB look the other direction.
The problem with no-enforcement is that it allows selective enforcement. In NYC, if you are on Wall St and use hard-drugs, there is no enforcement. Yet with stop-and-frisk and entire generation of colored individuals in poorer neighborhoods got random stopped, frisked, and booked with criminal history for "possession" offenses.
The problem with no-enforcement is that it allows selective enforcement. In NYC, if you are on Wall St and use hard-drugs, there is no enforcement. Yet with stop-and-frisk and entire generation of colored individuals in poorer neighborhoods got random stopped, frisked, and booked with criminal history for "possession" offenses.
If it is really no-enforcement, best to codify it with a law and really make it legal.
It is executed though for people who are abusing the grace of the law. Throw a rager in the park and you will get a talking to. Drink with a couple people and not be disruptive and you won’t. How would you formalize that into law though?
I thought about that puzzle quite a bit. The edge cases can get quite lame.
The only answer I've found is that one should define the rules strictly enough for people to make sense of them in advance. They should either be easy to find in context or be few enough to learn.
The obligations seem:
1) Document the issue at hand accurately and keep it up to date.
2) Write out the laws in a strict way that leaves as little room for interpretation as possible and keep it up to date.
3) Make sure those affected know what the laws are wasting as little of their time, money and effort as possible.
We seem surprisingly incompetent at 3. We should also be able to make the variables dynamic so that the thing updates it self.
They never really enforced open containers (walking around with drinks) in the Mission District around Valencia St unless someone was causing a problem. My guess is this change just makes it easier for police to identify who's over 21 with the wrist bands.
It's not that they're above laws, it's that laws only work on people who have something to lose.
You don't want to be arrested because you have a job, a family, people who care about you. A lot of homeless people are more focused on "how do I make today not the worst day of my life?" Turns out, drugs are really good at that. And, being arrested isn't so bad.
Also, arresting people is expensive. We can fine most people. Can't fine homeless people.
