A City Councilman in Los Angeles, Mitch O’Farrell, has proposed a bill to keep playgrounds “free of creepy activity” by not allowing anyone unaccompanied by kids to enter one.
Shamefully, that is already the rule here in my burg, New York City. This has lead to the arrest of two women who dared to eat donuts on a playground bench in Brooklyn (exposing kids to potential predators AND processed food!), and to the ticketing of seven guys who were playing on chess tables too close to a Mahattan playground (tables placed there by the city, but whatevs). The fact that the guys had been playing chess there for years and even taught some kids the game was of zero import to the authorities determined to see only potential evil, not actual good. Full Article
Absolutely sickening and pathetic. These lawmakers should be called out Publicly and Shamed for wasting tax payer dollars, as well as creating mass hysteria based on personal issues and opinions of their own. I suggest a contact list be created and their offices called Immediately.
Anybody with two braincells to rub together can see where this would be headed next if it’s not cut out at the root. They won’t stop at one registry. They won’t stop at this restriction. They’ll dream up more and more restrictions. Who doesn’t believe that?
We and other groups will eventually be restricted from more and more places. Maybe one day, as in Florida, we’ll be cut off from a way to get to work or from visiting places for food which have toy sections/play places in them.
Play whack-a-mole for one law and/or one state and watch it get a foothold in others or reemerge in yours in a different form.
Cut the root out….
From today’s New York Times:
A Debate Over Los Angeles’s Playgrounds
A proposal to bar unaccompanied adults from children’s playgrounds has struck a nerve.
There is no shortage of wonderful outdoor things to do in Los Angeles. But one thing is in decidedly short supply, particularly in the denser part of the cities: public parks. So a recent proposal by a Los Angeles City Council member to bar unaccompanied adults from children’s playgrounds has struck a nerve. The proposal was put forward by Councilman Mitch O’Farrell, who said he was simply trying to add public playgrounds to the list of places — such as schoolyards — that, under state law, are already off limits to adults who are not there with children.
“As city leaders, we owe this to our youngest Angelenos to create safe spaces for them,” he said in a letter to constituents. “Our park facilities should be a safe haven, and we must do our part to provide the proper shelter for our kids.”
The letter was sent out as Mr. O’Farrell faces questions about whether his proposal was an overreach, impeding the activities of law-abiding adults who don’t have children and who might want to enjoy the pleasure of sitting in a playground. “If you are worried that somebody is going to molest children, there are laws to prevent that,” said Peter Eliasberg, the chief counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. “You can’t just assume that because you’re an adult you don’t enjoy the sound of kids or watching kids in a playground.”
Mr. O’Farrell asked the city’s department of law to draft an ordinance based on his proposal. It would have to come to the City Council for approval before it could take effect.
Casey Revkin, a mother of a 2-year-old son who lives over in Silver Lake, said she supported Mr. O’Farrell’s initiatives. “I believe we can have sections of our parks designated for children and still have vibrant, diverse public spaces and communities,” she said. Others disagreed. “Who wouldn’t want to ban creepy activity or creepy people from playgrounds?” The Los Angeles Times asked in an editorial. “But what O’Farrell is proposing goes far beyond targeting worrisome activities that, in most cases, are already outlawed.”
Note the intercession of the “chief counsel” of the Southern CA ACLU. Maybe that’s someone Janice, and the others could work with on IML, etc.
Here’s the complete LA Times editorial:
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-playground-ban-20161227-story.html
Interesting…Mitch O’Farrell is apparently a gay man. We should ban gays from male restrooms because we all know the gays aren’t going there to pee.
Steve ~ I sure hope you are joking. We are trying not to be judged by others, and yet you are judging this group? The gay community went through a similar struggle, and they have come very far, which is great! We also want to be accepted and not judged, so I hope you will rethink your comment.
So banning adults from public parks unless in the company of children will make everyone safer? Hhhmmh?? Let me think about this one. Since the majority of children are being abused by family members, friends, teachers, etc, we should also ban all parents, teachers, clergymen from being around these vulnerable children. We need to separate children from their parents, just in case because you never know, keep teachers on a teleconference session without being in the classroom, and have children attend church without a priest, just in case. Since we want to prevent what MIGHT happen, we really need to have children live by themselves. Otherwise, we can never be sure they are safe, right? Am I missing something?
Oh i thought with all the successful lawsuits we’ve had regarding residency and other such lawsuits that these nuisance things would stop! Apparently there are still die-hards that havent got the word!
The most preposterous thing about O’Farrell’s proposal is that it ignores the fact that you will find very few, if any, children at a playground who are not already accompanied by an adult, so just what did you think some other adult was going to do in the presence of the children’s parents and/or guardian or supervisor?
Besides, if parents out there fear for the safety of their children, shouldn’t they be supervising and protecting them rather than be sending them out in the cold, cruel world alone and using that as a justification to restrict the movement of all other adults?
I posted this proposal by O’Farrell back in December in General Comments. He is playing to hysteria, he is exploiting fear and pushing it to new levels.
O’Farrell considers himself to be a liberal, but he is not, all he is is a corrupt politician who has taken well over$1 million from developers and their associated people in his first two years in office — 100% of “contributions” to him are from that crowd, and he is at the center of the big push led by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti to dramatically overdevelop Los Angeles even completely contrary to the zoning laws. Garcetti taught O’Farrell how to get an endless rain of money from developers when Garcetti was Councilman and O’Farrell was his aide. O’Farrell is a close protege of Garcetti, another pretend liberal.
A LOT of people in O’Farrell’s district have finally woken up and realized what he is doing. And with this proposal, all he is doing is trying to divert the public’s attention — and the expense of civil rights and by exploiting and pushing fear. He has an election coming up, he needs to hype fear of sex offenders to divert people’s attention from his corrupt pay-to-play quid pro quo with developers.
Bring it on and add to the confusion. this will lead to them being charged with attempted socks offenses and and then nature will continue to run its course ensnaring more and more people and sucking them into the vortex of ill conceived statutes based on fear and myths.
maybe then people will be able to deconstruct this quagmire
of cruel and unusual punishment disguised as a law.