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Is the U.S. a Police State?
(lemmy.world)
Let’s look at evidence:
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this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2024
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Wtf is even loitering? For some reason it reminds me of Skyrim guards going "No lollygagging". Fucking made up sounding words.
"stand or wait around without apparent purpose"
In other words: please do not exist in this vicinity.
Are you serious? It's illegal to just exist outdoors in the US? I think you're serious but that's just too comical to be real. Enjoying the sunset; straight to jail. Like what?
American freedom is the freedom to oppress people on your property. It's individualist freedom not collectivist freedom
Not generally, as others have mentioned, this is probably owned by the CVS and they want to discourage people from hanging around their store if they have no business with the store.
To the extent it is illegal, then it's in the domain of "trespassing" where the private property owner can decide you are no longer welcome. So if CVS "owns" that area, it may call on you for trespassing.
But first a CVS employee would have to tell you to leave. It's only trespassing if you don't leave after you're asked to, right?
This is the shit about the US I will never understand.
It's about racism.
Generally this stuff exists either due to old racist laws. It was illegal to not be working in reconstruction South, and white former slave owners could offer low paying jobs to former slaves. If the former slaves refused, they could be arrested for not having jobs, and due to the exception on prisoners being slaves, they could be enslaved again legally.
Vagrancy and loitering were banned in what's called the "black codes".
It's like jaywalking on an empty street or speeding 5 miles over the limit, they don't enforce it unless they want to use the law to harass someone.
Jaywalking is another thing I first heard of like a month or so ago that sounds both ridiculous as a law and as a word.
Don't the US have a range that your speed can be in? Like here you can be a bit over that's within the margin of error of your speedometer (Can't remember how much exactly since I haven't driven a car in like 2 decades)
No, or at least not in the state I'm from. They have penalties in the statutes for 1-5 miles per hour over. Usually the cop or traffic court judge will use discretion to ignore tickets and penalties in such minor cases, but when you don't codify that it can lead to more nefarious reasons for enforcing it.