Standing outside while black

Quote:

Police in Chester Township wielded a loitering law to harass and illegally detain residents, lawsuit says The plaintiffs say they were doing nothing more than standing in front of their homes when they were arrested. All charges against them were later dismissed. Baldwin said he was coming home from a restaurant with his wife in September 2019 when he saw his cousin, Brandon Alvin, being detained by officers on their block in Chester Township. His crime? Loitering in front of the house he lived in, Mincey said. The officers had Alvin — who is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit — pinned to the ground, and had just blasted him twice with pepper spray, Baldwin said. He said he stood on the sidewalk and watched the incident unfold mere feet from his front door. Then, he said, one of the officers accused him of loitering and ordered him to go inside. At the time, Baldwin said, he had a fractured knee from a car accident, and told the officers he needed to wait for his wife to hand him his walker before he could move. Rather than allow him to wait, Baldwin said, the officers pushed him to the ground and placed him under arrest for loitering. Chester Township’s loitering statute was adopted in 1990, four months after a nearly identical measure was added to the books in the city of Chester that made it illegal for anyone to loiter in a “high drug activity area” without “lawful and reasonable explanation for his presence there.”

It's illegal to stand around outside in a "high drug crime area".

One man was arrested twice in two days for the same loitering non-crime.

Quote:

As the cousins watched the arrests, officers ordered them — unlawfully, according to Mincey — to go inside. When they refused, both men were taken into custody, charged with violating the loitering statute and resisting arrest. The next day, after Keith Briggs’ mother came to pick him up from jail, the officers returned to the family’s home. There, they arrested Briggs’ cousin Kimyuatta Lewis and his aunt Rachel Briggs for loitering. When Keith and Rahmir Briggs tried to speak with the officers, they, too, were taken into custody, charged again with resisting arrest and other offenses.

https://www.inquirer.com/news/cheste...-20211016.html

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