LOITERING LAW REVERSED

Supreme Court strikes down ordinance aimed at gangs

WASHINGTON (AP)--

Chicago went too far in its fight against street gangs by ordering police to
break up groups of loiterers, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday, striking
down the city's law despite pleas from the Clinton administration, 31 states
and many mayors.

The court deemed as unconstitutionally vague the anti-loitering ordinance
that resulted in 45,000 arrests in the three years it was enforced.

"If the loitering is in fact harmless and innocent, the dispersal order
itself is an unjustified impairment of liberty," even if it did reduce
crime, Justice John Paul Stevens said in the court's main opinion.

The Illinois Supreme Court previously had invalidated the ordinance and
blocked its enforcement.

Yesterday's 6-3 ruling spurred six separate opinions and deep disagreement
among the justices.

Stevens, the highest court's only Chicago native, wrote for the majority
that the ordinance gave police officers too much discretion to arrest people
who never belonged to any gang.

But Clarence Thomas, a dissenter, said he feared the court "has
unnecessarily sentenced law-abiding citizens to lives of terror and misery."

Another dissenter, Justice Antonin Scalia, chastised the court for
"elevating loitering to a constitutionally guaranteed right."

But the court long has barred communities from using anti-loitering laws to
discriminate against racial minorities by, for example, trying to keep
blacks out of some towns or neighborhoods.

"We are grateful...that it is not a criminal activity simply to be a young
man of color gathered with friends on the streets of Chicago," said Harvey
Grossman, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who successfully
challenged the ordinance. "Such laws are likely to be enforced in a
discriminatory manner."

But Thomas, the court's only black justice and one of its consistently
conservative voices, cited far different concerns for innocent minorities.

"The people who suffer from our lofty pronouncements are people...who have
seen their neighborhoods literally destroyed by gangs and violence and
drugs," he said.

"They are good, decent people who must struggle to overcome their desperate
situation, against all odds, in order to raise their families, earn a living
and remain good citizens.

The 1992 ordinance required police to oder any group of people standing
around with no apparent purpose to move along if an officer believed at
least one of them belonged to a street gang. Those who disregarded the
ordinance would be arrested.