'Police. Step Away From the Chess Table'
cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com
cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com
I keep rolling this around in my mind. It makes sense but at the some time it doesn't make sense at all. I'm sure it's intended to keep people from kidnapping kids or adults from destroying equipment but I fail to see how it would even be remotely effective at that.
Not a good job at that - the vast majority of kidnappings (or hell, cases of child abuse in general) are done by people known to the family.
The creepy stranger who will swoop in when you turn your back and kidnap your child is 99% a figment of one's imagination.
Exactly. I just didn't say it in those terms because I don't have a source for it handy.
The only people who really should be playing chess are those who aren't there with kids.
Not only is it terribly violent it is rather anti-american. The monarchy, church and knights all in charge capturing and crushing the pawns to gain territory, not to mention that it pitches black against white.
Whoooosh
Unless ojbyrne was being ironing, as in, what about dictatorial rule is un-American?
I could go either way on the justice/prudential aspect of it. On the one hand, there are a lot of laws that condemn the homeless to essentially permanent low-level conflict with the police. There are justice issues with that. ("The law, in all its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges.") On the other hand, I know of public spaces which welcome the homeless with open arms and I know of public spaces which I would enjoy spending time at, and those are disjoint sets. To the extent that the general public being able to enjoy parks is important (which is very, very low on my list of priorities), I (mildly) sympathize with their desires for them to not have homeless people in them.
Heck in my town, it's not legal to sit on the main street, yet there are benches all along.
Selective enforcement.
Obviously this was just a good excuse to kick the 'creepy looking' people out of the park. I'll bet $100 that none of the people they tried to kick out were clean cut businessmen wearing a suit and tie.
Being in a playground while adult and male!
(Similarly, if you're 40 years old, you can't go to the public kindergarten. It's because the program is designed to educate 5-year-olds, not 40-year-olds. Nothing to do with sex, it's merely practicality.)
If that IS the case, we have bigger problems.
With a simple rule change you wouldn’t even have to change anything about the playground layout. Just allow unaccompanied adults playing chess and nothing else and the problem is solved.
Amending the sign to read something like "no adults, unless playing or watching chess, but not if a child has been waiting to play, except ..." would get complicated fast. Just go to a different park already.
British Airways recently had to admit they had a secret policy of moving men seated next to other's children on flights. It only came up when they moved Boris Johnson from sitting next to his own kids, they didn't realise they were his own children - presumably they looked human (although you have to wonder if the kids were secretly relieved)
Then, I don't think its a coincidence that this is on the news. He probably kept complaining and got picked up by local news.
Why couldn't this effort instead begin with addressing the crimes that residents were complaining about? If they're complaining about, say, drug dealing in this playground, why not deal with that first and leave the chess players until after the real problems have been fixed (or try removing the chessboards...).
Give me a minute to do the tactical analysis scenario....
But honestly, I think the "broken window" reasoning has nothing to do with them breaking the rules and more to do with class. A lot of the chess players are poor, some of them are street people, and a lot of the ones who aren't poor look and dress like the ones who are. The parents look at them with a certain prejudiced eye and think, "These people are not a wholesome element, they are of the street." And the parents fear that criminals and junkies might look at the chess players with the same prejudiced eye and think, "These guys are of the street; they're poor and low-class like me. If they're welcome here, then me and my criminal behavior are welcome here too." So the theory is that parents will stop bringing their kids, and low-grade criminals will start hanging out. Because of the perception of the chess players as a "street" element, basically a conflation of class with criminality, their presence can turn a park sleazy through no fault of theirs, just through the prejudice of other people. And some instinctive, gut-feeling version of that theory is what resulted in the police being tasked to "clean up" the park by evicting the chess players.
That's unfair. Innocent people shouldn't be punished because of how they're perceived by other people, even if that perception is causing real harm.
Either the sign is legal, in which case it's good to enforce it (a warning I'm sure is enough for a first "offense"), or fight the legality of the sign.