Monday, September 20, 2004

Chicago cracks down on the pressing social ills of "wandering" and "lingering"

Chicago, never a great walking city, is now an even worse place to be a pedestrian:

"Sophisticated new computer programs will immediately alert the police whenever anyone viewed by any of the cameras placed at buildings and other structures considered terrorist targets wanders aimlessly in circles, lingers outside a public building, pulls a car onto the shoulder of a highway, or leaves a package and walks away from it. Images of those people will be highlighted in color at the city's central monitoring station, allowing dispatchers to send police officers to the scene immediately."

OK, the package thing makes a bit of sense, but do the police need to be alerted every time someone "wanders aimlessly in circles" or "lingers outside a public building"? So now, anyone who wants to sit in front of the Art Institute or walk up Michigan Ave., check out a side street or two, then return, is considered suspicious? If you can't walk around or linger, what exactly can you do in downtown Chicago? Shop? Panhandle? But those amount to walking and lingering, respectively, when you think about it.

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