Richard Kimble on Chicago's Gang Loitering Ordinance September 9, 2001

Richard Kimble is professor at John Marshall Law School.

Ah, good morning. I’m ah, filling in for one of the, for Micheal Sang who is in my opinion the world’s leading expert on Supreme Court cases and opinions. But we’ve done a bunch of work together on a lot of different things including one case to the Supreme Court ourselves. He’s done a half a dozen of them. Um, and I’ve worked with some groups who worked to revise or ammend or change the gang ordinance. As I understand it the course is about gangs and the media, I guess one of the questions one reasonably can ask is is does the media influence how the court and judges see gangs and I think frankly the answer has to be yes. Just as Frankfurter is famously known for having said that he did not read the newspapers, I think if there’s any doubt as to whether the judges read newspapers what happened in the last election in Florida should put that to rest.

They are the third branch of government. They’re a co-equal branch with the Congress and the President in that sense, part of their responsibility has to be to preserve and protect the system. To that extent they probably have an obligation to read the newspapers. Uh, we always think of them as deciding case and persuing justice and making sure there’s no mistakes made by the lower courts, the trials courts, the intermediate courts, the state courts and so on. The, it’s part of what they do. But I think clearly it is increasingly recognized that they are the third branch of government and therefore perform the role, similar to Congress and the President, which is to keep the system functioning as as it has and as they their lights lead them to see. In terms of the role of the Supreme Court, I think most, many of us certainly if not most assume that the role of the court is to make sure the system doesn’t make mistakes, to make sure that the lower courts haven’t fouled up, that some injustice hasn’t been commited in our name through the court system. The reality is that that’s not true. The Court says that is not their job. The Court get about 7000 requests a year to reverse what happened in a lower court. They’re technically called Petitions for Certerori, you don’t need to know that. Don’t ask me how to spell it. I can do the history but not the spelling. Um, they’re petitions, they’re requests to the Court in writing by lawyers saying look, these guys down here in these lower courts really messed up big time. Big time. They violated the Constitution, they violated federal law, you should do something. 7000 times a year. Out of hundreds of thousands of cases, there are very few cases that are appealed to the Supreme Court of all the cases that are filed. And if you’ve ever gotten a traffic ticket you know that there’s millions of judicial proceedings that have nothing to do with justice. They’re revenue collectors; they’re just ways to kind of allocate the cost of running the operation and reminding us that, I didn’t get caught last time and while I’m innocent this time for sure, your Honor, we all know in our heart of hearts that we violated the law last week or we’ll do it next week or whatever. Speeding, parking that kind of stuff. 7000 petitions. The Supreme Court hears, takes, listens to, decides, reviews 70. 70 out of 7000. All right? So that there’s 6930 instances where the lawyers feel that they can make a compelling case that the Constitution or the Federal law has been violated and the Supreme Court says, ‘Sorry, We’re busy’.

So the Court is not about, is not in the business of making sure the system never makes a mistake. We have an enormous amount of reliance on the lower federal courts and a lot of faith in process. The system assumes that if the process is fair the outcomes will be as good as you can get in the real world with human beings administering it. So if the process, the trial, the notice, the hearing, the judge is independent, there’s a jury, everybody has access to a lawyer then everything else will take care of itself. It doesn’t take a lot consciousness or the reality of contemporary American life to know that the process has some deep flaws of its own that raise questions about how much reliance you can place on it. Everybody does not have equal access to lawyers. That’s the most obvious to me. The very rich get incredibly bright gifted dedicated creative lawyers with enormously deep pockets, access to millions of dollars and hundreds of the best and the brightest minds. To go back to Bush vs. Gore if you thought about it or watched it or followed it, they were lawyers everywhere and they all had pedigrees. They sounded like Sea Biscuit is a racehorse. They’re third generation geniuses; they’d all graduated at the top of their class; they’d all clerked for the Supreme Court. The very poor who can get access to lawyers through the legal services programs, get lawyers of comprable skill and talent. There’s not as many to go around and they don’t have anywhere near the number of or amount of resources so it’s not really a fair fight. But in terms of pure raw talent those people do fine. The vast number in the middle it’s a bit of a crap shoot, if I can use that expression. I don’t mean that in a crude sense. I mean that as a game. In any event it’s a bit of a roll of the dice.

All of that said, for context, about what the courts does, the city of Chicago, and I’m gonna start the words of Justice Thomas, at the Supreme Court level, who in the case reviewing the Chicago ordinance, The City of Chicago versus Morales is the technical name. The City of Chicago versus Moralas. Justice Thomas dissented from the majority’s conclusion that the ordinance was unconstitutional, that the ordinance was fatally flawed, the ordinance had to be set aside and there was no gang ordinance that could be enforced in Chicago. Justice Thomas said that the majority had condemned, let me just flip some pages here since I’m the fill in I’m gonna fell comfortable to use my notes, normally I can wing it more readily but I’m gonna cheat here, he said that the majority had sentenced the Chicago citizens to “lives of terror and misery.” Justice Thomas said that the decision of the court to strike down the Chicago anti-gang loitering ordinance condemned, sentenced was his word, the citizens of Chicago to lives of terror, which takes on a whole new meaning that was said two and a half years ago, terror and misery. Now, the ordinance basically said, it’s unconstitutional it’s off the books, the gang ordinance said, if there’s a group of people loitering, hanging out on a street corner, and one of the members of the crowd is a member of a gang, is reasonably believed to be a member of a gang by the local police – if the cop thinks one of the people hanging out is a gang member then the cop has authority to tell everybody to disperse and if they don’t, any and all of them can be arrested, the gang member and the non gang members. All right? That’s what the ordinance said. In, without quoting it; paraphrasing it. So, you guys are hanging out on the corner with each other and the cop on the beat percieves that one of you is a gang member, he comes up and the statute says the cop must, my father was a policeman so I’m comfortable saying cop, the last time I was in court arguing before a judge in Chicago here I used the expression cop and the judge said council do you know what that means and frankly, I don’t remember what he told me it meant but I explained my father was a policeman and he said well your father would appreciate it if you refer to the policemen as policemen. My father was a cop. And damn proud of it. And after last Tuesday it’s hard not to feel good about at least what they do some of the time. You know the old joke is, somebody yells help we all run that way and the cops have to go the other way. They do terrible things to, they’re human. The cop reasonably believes one of you characters is a gang member comes up and tells you you gotta disperse, if you don’t all of you get arrested. All you arrested.

All right. In the first three years of the ordinance, before it got to the Supreme Court. There were 9600 dispersal orders. 9600 times a Chicago policeman came up to a group of citizens standing on a street corner, doing nothing, right? Loitering is defined as hanging out with no apparent reason. Which is what, if I can remember way to being younger than you, we look were doing outside of the local candy store but we had a real reason for being there, right? Camera chip to look at the girls, to smoke cigarettes cause, and they were real cigarettes not what you may be doing, in those days, it was before modern times, and solve all the problems of the world. And get away from home. You know? I’d had it at home. The old man was giving me a hard time, my mother was giving me a hard time, I couldn’t stand my sister that night. So I may have had no apparent reason for hanging. So the ordinance talks about if there’s no apparent reason for you being there, the cop issues the order. 9600 times it happened in 3 years. The math is it happened 3200 times a year. Which is roughly 1000 times a day. And there were 4200 arrests in that 3 year period. 9600 and 4200 people were arrested. Which means at least that many basically said to the cop yeah. And then you can elaborate the yeah any way you want. All right. The folks who were arrested, what lawyers do when their clients are arrested and they’re representing their clients is they, they look at the law under which they were arrested and see if the law is consistent with the Constitution. Our system assumes liberty, that’s the norm we assume, that you’re free to do anything you want to do unless there’s a law against it. So unless there’s a law against it, you can do whatever you want to do. And because it’s a constitutional order, all of the laws have to fit under the Constitutional umbrella. They have to be consistent with that set of values and norms. All right. So the lawyer starts with the, the system starts with the premise you can do anything you want to do. And when there’s a law that says you can’t do something that you did, the first question is did the government have the authority to make that law? Did the government have the right to infringe on liberty? It’s a weird notion. It’s a weird notion.

For those of you, which is to say all of us, who grew up in some kind of family structure, you know that, like it or not there’s all kinds of limits on your liberty. There has to be otherwise you can’t live together, you can’t function. You know? Somebody’s got to put out the garbage, somebody’s got to clean the toilet bowl, somebody’s got to set the scheduales, somebody’s got to say naw we can’t do that now we got to do it later, etc, etcetera, ecetera. So to start from the notion of absolute liberty is a kind of a stunning risk. It’s the announcement of a value of such high order that will take all those attendent risks and unless the government, the system catches up to you, in terms of passing laws, you pretty much can do what you want. Now there’s one overriding limit and that is reasonableness. There are literally unwritten laws and thousands of laws where the legal standard is reasonableness. So if you behave in an unreasonable way you’re guilty of negligance. If you drive in an unreasonable way and somebody gets hurt you pay. If you enter into a contract and you’re trying to comply and conform and you act in an unreasonable way you pay. If you’re in any kind of relationship and you act unreasonable, you pay. You’re the one involved. So that’s the bigget limit, um.

Right. So what I thought I’d do, um is um, this is nice, there’s a clock right up front here. Is kind of run through the history of sidewalks. I uh, I grew up in Brooklyn NY, and that’s where the accent comes from. My wife says it’s a speech impediment, I think it’s a Brooklyn accent. At any rate, and I’m an old Brooklyn Dodgers fan so I don’t like the Cubs, I don’t like the Sox. I don’t even think the Cubs play baseball. They just play Wrigely field right?

(You had the audience.)
I just wanted to see how many were still with me. I wanted to see how many are still with me. Now during the last World Series I stopped some Chicago folks and said did you see the game last night on television and they said what game? I said the World Series. Awph. Cub fans. They don’t care about baseball they only care about Wrigley’s field. All right, now that I’ve alienated my audience and set up some tension. Um, who owns the sidewalks? Who owns the sidewalks? All right? The city? They’re free, who built them? What’s the story? Back in 1897 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was a very very very famous justice, eventually on the Supreme Court, said that there was no difference between the city prohibiting people from using the sidewalks at all than there than there was with you or whoever owns your house or runs your house, telling people they can’t come into your house. That the government had the same control over the sidewalks that you and I or your landlords have over your house. This was back in 1897. And that was the generally thought notion, ah, in 1897 the majority of people were still farmers and lived in a rural enviroment so sidewalks were not the common norm that they are for us today everywhere in the country but especially for us in the big cities.

In 1939, in a in a case involving a labor dispute, one of the Supreme Court justices who’s also well fam – also well known and not nearly as famous as Justice Holmes, Justice Robin Roberts said that the sidewalks are held in trust for the people to be used by the people any way they want and that view existed forever. All right. All right. So let’s test Justice Roberts thesis that the sidewalks are are ours to be used any way we want any time we want and it’s always been that way. Well we know it’s not always been that way because Justice Holmes, thirty or so years later said, earlier, said it wasn’t. How about just hanging out? The city of Chicago, I’m gonna make all these things up now but they’re all acutal Supreme Court cases, the city of Chicago adopts an ordinance that says nobody can loiter, gang members, anybody, no one can loiter on the street corner. Cop comes up and says you guys are just hanging out loitering, get out of here, you don’t, you get arrested, you go to court, your lawyer says your Honor yes my client did what the cop said he did or didn’t do what the cop asked him to but the law, the loitering ordinance is unconstitutional. The Court, the Court’s ultimately agreed that bans on loitering were unconstitutional. So you can loiter. You have a constitutional right, or at least the holding of the case was the word loitering didn’t communicate clearly enough what it is you could or could not do so the ordinance was unconstitutional.

How about if you’re hanging out and you’re annoying? I just blew through the front of the John Marshall law school and there’s a whole gang of folks hanging out right in front of the building smoking under the cover. So there’s 50 of them in a space that holds 10 and I can’t get out and one I think they’re all addicts, two I think they’re stupid, three I don’t want to pay for them on Medicaid when they get lung cancer and four I’m late. And five I’m just a cranky old man. So I blow through and tell em all to get a life. Right? Now it turns out under my new law here there’s an ordinance that the city has adopted that says annoying people can’t use the sidewalk. And I call the cop and say arrest them, they are really and truly annoying.

(They call the cop)
Well yeah for me knocking em over and abusing them verbally. What they’re really gonna do is complain to the dean. I’ll deal with that. Um. That ordinance is also unconstitutional. Even annoying people can use the sidewalks. Even annoying people can use the sidewalks. How about vagabonds and what’s this other word I wrote down here?, rogues? Vagabonds and rogues. All right? Beggars and those kinds of folks. Can they use the sidewalk? Walk anywhere in the Loop, you know that you can’t get very far without somebody asking you for help. Right. Couple days ago right after Tuesday, I was consciuos of a mutual dependency in some guy who obviously was beyond help by anything I could do for said heyyyahah, so I gave him a dollar and I walked a half a block away and a guy, a construction guy up in one of the overhangs where they were working said, hey old man. I don’t know why I looked up, I don’t relate to myself as old man but I looked up anyhow. He says you know that guy probably makes more money than you or I and he doesn’t pay taxes. And I said, well, and kept walking. Climb over folks like that, they’re selling newspapers, sticking em in your face, they’re making you feel guilty, I can’t walk across the bridge to the train. I gotta climb over people, I got to walk around guys in wheelchairs, all that kind of stuff. Vagabonds, rogues, beggars, those kinds of folks, can they use the sidewalk? There’s a law against begging on the street. Unconstitutional. They can use the sidewalk. They can use the sidewalks.

Now how bout those people who are really annoying? Those politican types? The worst of the worst. I I don’t mean that, actually politics to me, personally, is the highest secular calling, that if it weren’t for politics and politicians we’d come unglued and have more of what happened Tuesday. Tuesday is a failure of, a breakdown in the political order. If you have a political functioning system you don’t have that kind of stuff, certianly not on that kind of scale. That said, what about the guys handing out handbills? Right? Vote for my candidate, do this do that, all these people with causes and they’re trying to save the world. All right. There’s an ordinance that says no handing out handbills. That’s unconstitutional. All right? So loiterers, annoying people, rogues and vagabonds, and handbillers, all can hand out can do their thing. Can do their thing.

Now what about a guy with a bullhorn? Noisy and obnoxious you don’t agree with his message, or even if you do, but he’s noise and ‘wah wah wah wah’ with a bullhorn or the sound trucks that ride around. And there’s an ordinance that says no bullhorns, no sound trucks, too noisy. That is constitutional. That’s permissable. The government can control the noise level, the sound level, can prohibit the use of bullhorns and sound trucks. Certainly at certain times of the day. You can’t be riding up and down residential streets at 11 oclock at night with bullhorns and sound trucks saying vote for senator claghorn. First of all Senator Claghorn wouldn’t do it if he had any sense cause no one’s gonna vote for him if he does that but over and above that the government can prohibit it.

How about I’m really ticked with the mayor, or the city council member, or some other government official, and I want to picket right in front of their house. I want them to know just how ticked off I am. All right? And I got a gang of people right in front of the door of this official, or let’s change it a little bit and make it more provocative and sensistive, the house I’m in front of is a doctor who performs abortions and all of the picket signs say you in there you’re living with a murderer, your husband’s a murderer, your dad’s a murderer, picture’s of fetuses, right? And they’re chanting up and down in front of the guy’s house. There’s a law that says you can’t do that. Is that constitutional? Can the government stop those folks from using the sidewalk that way? I don’t think you should be too surprised, if they can ban too much noise they can probably ban that. And the answer is that they can ban what’s called targeted picketing, in other words you’re focusing on one person. And you’re probably blocking the sidewalk and you have no right to block the sidewalks. You can use them, but everybody else has to be able to use them too. All right but how about walking through the neighborhood, or picketing the guy’s church or his office or that kind of a thing saying doctor so and so’s a murderer, your neighbor’s a murderer, do you want to live in the same neighborhood with murderers. And that’s what the signs say. Those folks as long as they keep moving and don’t block the sidewalk, and don’t congregate in front of this one guy’s house are protected by the Constitution and can do that. And can do that. And that’s pretty harsh stuff if you think about it. Pretty harsh stuff.

Same kind of situation arose in connection with places where there are abortions, or abortion clincs or hospitals where they’re performed the anti abortion people would congregate and try to persuade or convince the person who was gonna seek medical advice or help not to do it. And the Court agreed that the law could create buffer zones, that people would have to be kept 30 or 50 of 75 feet away. Same rule in connection with Embassies. You want to picket the Saudi Arabian Embassay or the Consulate up on Michigan avenue the cops can keep you a certain distance away. All right, so, that’s the back ground, the context for the Chicago gang ordinance. Is it Constitutional or not? All right, in light of all those cases, those precedents, those prior experiences where the Courts have said this is good, this is no good, this is allowed, this is not allowed, how the Courts going to decide the gang ordinance?

Turns out that a majority of the judges thought that the, right, let me get the right theory here, um… I’ve got this right, the two issues, let me get at this right. Um, if the law, if there was a law that said you can’t hang out on the street corner and a cop came up and said, for no apparent reason, you can’t hang out on a street corner for no apparent reason. And a cop came up and said move, you’re just hanging out, I don’t see why you’re here. Well let me ask you this, how many of you would of thought that hanging out on a street corner could be a criminal act? Let me ask better yet, how many of you have ever hung out on a street corner? This happens in law school too, same thing. How many of you never hung out on a street corner? Right. Right. And the rest of you, didn’t vote. In law school, if you want to be a judge, you’ve gotta choose up sides. Right. So when professors asks a question you just say yes or no but you can’t be nuetral, you can’t have no opinion, you can’t put your head down. I’ve seen lots of tops of heads, every time the professor says ‘anybody ah’ you just see tops of heads. Right? No eye contact.
Jim Hightower, who’s kind of the Rush Limbaugh of the left politically, talks about the only thing in the middle of the road, the only thing that’s nuetral in these kinds of choose up sides questions, the only thing in the middle of the road are yellow lines and dead armadillos. So I feel guilty that I’ve exposed so many of you to the dead armadillos but all right.

All of us have hung out on street corners. Inevitably, whether there’s a corner there or not, whether there’s a sidewalk or not, we hang out outside of our high schools if we’re in the suburbs or grew up in a place where there weren’t street corners, you hang out outside of what I call candy stores, you hang out outside of 7-11’s, you hang out on all kinds of places. Nothing, everybody’s been saying the world changed since Tuesday, it hasn’t changed enough to do away with people hanging out on street corners watching each other go by and just hanging. Why in your mind would you ever think that you were commiting a criminal act? Just hanging out on the street corner? I think the answer’s no. And if a cop came up, your instinct, depending on how you were brought up and your value scheme and your own personal experiences and a lot of other things would be that so and so is just another abusive obnoxious cop and I’m gonna give him a hard time but not too hard a time cause I don’t want to get arrested. All right. Or you’re going to say of course officer and do whatever he wants you to do. But it’s only in the officer’s head that the society knows what’s going on. Now it may have been that there was a bomb scare a block away and the cop’s trying to clear out things, it may be that he knows an ambulance is coming because Mary Smith had a heart attack two doors down, it may be that he is the rotten so and so that you think he is and he’s just flexing his muscle and giving the guys a hard time. And it may be everything in between. The question is can you have a fair law, can you have a law that’s valid when the only one who knows what it means is the cop? Or does a law to be valid have to be clear enough that the people who are affected by it can see and know and understand what it’s about? All right. And the notion, the technical legal term is that a statue is unconstitutional, violates the due process clause, if it’s vague, too vague, so vague that the person’s affected can not know what kind of behavior is permitted and forbidden. So one of the questions for the court in the Morales case, Chicago versus Morales, the gang ordinance case, was what does it mean to say loitering with no apparent purpose? Is that clear enough?

They, some of the judges said you have a right to hang out on a street corner, to loiter, so there’s a Constitutionaly protected interest there. Some of the judges didn’t agree with that, they thought that could be regulated just like access to the highways can be regulated, just like you need a license, there’s speed limits, parking controls and they shut and close highways regularly and so on and so forth. Some of the other judges said, you know, the cop, only has to say to himself, subjectively, these guys have no reason to be there, I can move em out. And the Court said you know it’s vague, loitering for no apparent reason is vague, but maybe it’s not so vague it’s unconstitutional but when you couple it to the fact that there’s no limit control guidance for the cop on the beat then the law’s unconstitutional. Because when all is said and done the cops are our agents, they’re doing what we want them to do, they have no independent authority except as we give them authority. And that means there has to be rules, a cop has to have a rulebook that says these are the laws, these are the rules, and here’s how we’re gonna enforce them. And they’re knowable up front by the rest of us. Whether we really know them or not, we can know them. And if we don’t like the laws and rules you vote the people who wrote them out of office. So the cop is nothing but an agent, just a doer of our bidding, that’s the theory of it, right? And if the cop is working under a law that doesn’t set any limits, no parameters, no guidance, basically says do what you think is best, then you have lawless government because it’s not a law, it’s just the cop’s objective judgement. The nature of law is that if a general applicability and it’s applied pretty uniformly to everybody in the same circumstance. All right. General applicability and it’s applied pretty uniformly to everybody in the same circumstance. Well, if the law changes with every cop and every cop’s mood and every street corner, that’s not law, that’s arbitrary decision making. Now the cop may be right, look my bias would be the cop’s more often right than wrong, your experience may lead you to the conclusion that the cop’s almost always wrong. That’s not the issue. The issue is is the cop acting persuant to some guidance that we the law have laid out or is the cop doing his own thing? Right? Even Mother Theresa was wrong some of the time. All right so you don’t want a system of saints, in fact if you think about it maybe we definitely don’t want saints being in charge, cause the rest of us ain’t and they’d have no understanding; so maybe we want sinners running the government? Right? Nah.

(We succeeded)
Yeah right. It was suggested here by professor that we succeeded. Maybe too well. Maybe too well. Um, so the Courts said the statue, the ordinance was unconstitutional because it didn’t give notice of what was wrong or right, I standing on the street corner couldn’t know whether I could be there or not, plus I don’t know you’re a gang member. Eh she looks pretty suspicious to me, I’m willing to bet she’s one of them. What does a gang member look like? I know you wear your oh he’s got a hat, he must be a gang member. And he’s got that brim. That weird wacky way that you guys hide under? Open it up man you’re young, you’re beautiful, you’ve got a life ahead of yourself, share it for god’s sake. All these guys running around with their hats like this absolutely freaks me out makes no sense to me. Who you hiding from? Plus you’re missing half of the life you know? All these beautiful people over here. I don’t care what your persuasion is they’re all beautiful people over here. All right.

Anyhow. I don’t know what a gang member looks like. Does a cop know what a gang member looks like? How bout the gang squad? The gang control cops? Sure they do. And they’re right almost always, they’re right almost always as to who’s the gang member and who’s not. But one of the judges said if just being a member of a gang without any futher proof that you’ve done anything else, this is the hard question, this is the tricky one where the sociologists and the experts come in, but the instinct for those of us who don’t know the law of L-O-R-E, of gangs, and the rituals that one has to go through to become a member of a gang, probably work under the assumption which many of us do I think that you know, I had a gang, we yeah we were a gang, the nuns kept telling us you gangs are out of order blah blah blah blah blah blah. Or is it that to be a gang member you have to go out and kill somebody or to rob a bank, or beat somebody up, or abuse your body or somebody’s elses body by cutting it up or scarring it or tattoing it or some other crazy dumb thing. Um, I don’t know. So, if it turns out you gotta kill somebody to be a gang member then that’s one tight situation, if you don’t have to do anything bad just make yourself potentially availible to do it that’s another thing. One of the judges said, if just being a gang member is enough to justify police action then we’ve made all gang members without any other evidence or any other acts outlaws. Outlaws. All right.

In early America and tragically in certain people’s minds over the last 8 or 10 days, just because somebody’s an x they’re an enemy.When the pilgrams got off the boat and some of the pilgram’s started thinking independently they were banished. They were kicked out of the community, they were sent from Massachusetts to Rhode Island, or from Massachusetts to what became Rhode Island, or Conneticut. That’s how those states were founded, by people who were driven out because they were different. So you make somebody an outlaw you mean they’re not protected by the law anymore and anybody can do anything they want to them. Wanted dead or alive, shoot to kill. That’s what being an outlaw is about. You’re outside the protection of the law. And the court was sensitive to that notion. All right.

So when the Court got done, some of the judges dissented. Three of the judges dissented, the Chief Justice – Rhenquist, Justice Scalia, and Justice Thomas. Justice Thomas, as I said in the beginning, was very aggressive in saying that setting that ordinance aside condemned Chicago citizens to a life of terror. Now I don’t know about any of you, and I don’t know where you come from or where you live, or how you lived or any of that stuff, I’ve done enough in and around the city as a lawyer for folks to know that a lot of people truly do live in dread of gangs. That the existence of gangs in the neighborhood causes other people in the neighborhood to live in dread and fear and they change their lives dramatically. They don’t go out when they would of gone out, they stay in when they didn’t want to stay in, they go in one direction as opposed to another direction, they perpetuate stereotypes, um, cautions, views, pass on to their kids and their grandkids. Some of them are pushed so far they start carrying guns and doing wacky things themselves. Can the city deal with gangs? Has the Supreme Court left the city without any weapons to fight the scurge of gangs as I described it? And one of the great debates about something like the Black Panthers back in the 60’s and 70’s was were they good guys or bad guys? Were they good guys or bad guys? And I’m intending to apply this to gangs. I don’t know enough about any Chicago gangs to say anything or mention any names. But way back then were they good guys or bad guys? Is the Hammas in Palastine good guys or bad guys? If they run the hospitals, they feed the poor people, if they provide the doctors for the sick, if they’re the ones who maintain the roads and do all this stuff, are they the good guys or bad guys? Were the Black Panthers the good guys or bad guys in the neighborhoods where they controlled the turf, when they did all the security, they provided all the education, they encouraged all the teachers, they protected the neighborhood from all kinds of stuff. Each of us has to have an opinion. Otherwise you’re yellow lines and dead armadillos. And I have opinions which may not be the same as yours but we have to acknowledge as a legitamate question as to what gangs are about. And what kind of stress and pressures and theats existed in the nieghborhood that to them at least, justify some of what they do. You can guess my biases, but be that as it may, there, it’s a more complex question than just saying a pox, a plague on all of you guys, on all the gang members.

Can the city of Chicago deal with gangs? Was this ordinance, did the Supreme Court by taking away this ordinance condemn them to this life of terror and misery? The court told the city how to rewrite the ordinance. The court, some of the members of the court actually said rewrite the ordinance and say if there’s objective evidence, not subjective in the cop’s head, that it’s a gang group as opposed to one gang member with ten other people who aren’t gang members and if you only arrest the gang members and not their non gang member friends, then maybe the ordinance passes muster, maybe it’s Constitutional, maybe it’s valid. If the behavior is intimidating or threatening they can be arrested. Don’t say you’re going to tell them to disperse cause nobody knows what that means. How far for how long? And then you going arrest em. 42000 people arrested in three years. That’s a lot of bodies under this kind of ordinance. So the Court basically said, make the ordinance clearer, make it more focused on the bad guys, or at least people who presumptively are likely to do bad things who have done bad things. So if it’s intimidating, if they’re blocking the street, if they’re too noisy, if they’re plotting and scheming, if they’re anticipating shinanigins, that’s a casual word to discover a multitude of terrible things, then you can get them. And the City has spent a fair amount of time trying to revise the ordinance. Whatever they come up with will be litigated again. And again. And again. That’s the American way right? Better to hire a lawyer than to shoot each other? All right I gather that in addition to being dead armadillos that some of you watch the clock and are anxious. I don’t know what have we got?

(5 minutes)
5 minutes all right. That’s the long winded story. Comments questions anything for five minutes worth. Go ahead.
(S: So um how did these laws… get made… Seems like they just go on randomly throwing things out there until they don’t get returned. And the process will just keep people tied up… and continue… you mean keep on revising it slowly and slowly…)
The question is can the government play the game of just passing laws they know are probably no good and force the people they’re mad at and angry with and not happy about to spend all of their money protecting themselves instead of doing whatever it is that they want to do? And the answer is in large measure they can but there are limits. If the victim, the targets can prove that the government was targeting them without any reasonable basis there are cases where the court has imposed restrictions on the government in doing that sort of stuff. But those are very very hard to win because no reasonable basis means no reasonable basis. And typically anybody who’s outside the mainstream where the majority of people trying to get them, there’s always some reasonable basis to be nervous if not hostile so…

(S: And it doesn’t have to assume that the… be received by the Supreme Court? I mean if it ever got to that level?)
That’s where I started here, doesn’t it mean, doesn’t the premise assume the Supreme Court might eventually get involved. That’s why I started where I did. The role of the court is not to correct every mistake. The system relies on the process and the good will of the people and this is my last finger wagging point here, I hope I haven’t wagged it too much, democracy’s pretty fragile. We like to think of ours as strong and er, it can come unglued real easy and some of you live in neighborhoods where there is no real effective government that assures you of saftey and the ability to do what you want to do, to raise your family and live your life your own way. In this country and that’s proof to me that democracy’s pretty fragile. If we all don’t work together and that includes everybody in some sense, then the system can come unglued and weird things happen. You know there’s a lot of dead siks and beat up and abused Moslems and people from Arabia in the last eight days, um, it’s easy for all of us live this close to being weird. Right? You live in a family you know how close your parents get, and if you have a lot of brothers and sisters. So when the system changes and some of the glue gets stretched and dried up it can snap. So democracy’s pretty fragile thing and you’re the ruling elite. You’re gonna have college educations, you’re gonna be part of the ruling elite. If you’re dead armadillos, I guarentee you your grandchildren will never sit in a room like this. I guarentee it. But if you chose up sides and set some minimum limits, then they might live in a different world in a different classroom. Might be costing ten times as much or half as much, the professors may be better or worse, anyhow. I don’t mean to lecture at you. Thank you for having me, good luck on your exam and I’ll see you.