In an ill-advised move last month, the Chicago City Council passed an ordinance that makes “prostitution-related loitering” a prosecutable offense defined as “remaining in any one place under circumstances that would warrant a reasonable person to believe that the purpose or effect of that behavior is to facilitate prostitution.” The language of the new statute mirrors the city’s gang-related and narcotics-related loitering statutes, which have been widely criticized for giving officers carte blanche to engage in blatant racial profiling and populate a gang database with the names of people as young as 1 on the flimsiest of presumptions.
July 24, 2018 / by Andrea J. Ritchie & Brit Schulte
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