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Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

Nice change I suppose, though it's still insane that the US has such strong prohibitions against drinking alcohol in public imo.

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The U.S. has effectively made walking illegal or unpalatable in most places.

https://digitalcommons.tourolaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...

Yeah when i moved to the USA i found it jarring when someone explained to me the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-container_law

A widespread law specific to the USA that doesn't seem to be a thing anywhere else in the world. We can take beers to a picnic in our parks. Shocking i know. Other societies haven't collapsed from allowing this.

To be very fair, I do not know a single person who has ever been charged with this. I and all my friends drink in the park all the time and the cops don't seem to care. If I get on a crowded bus, odds are good that there's a homeless man with a brown paper bag.

This law is probably only enforced against businesses selling booze or people who are being a nuisance.

Might surprise you but it affects minorities the most and a common excuse for an officer to probe them for possibly worse crimes.

That’s what “people who are being a nuisance” means.

Did you mean to equate minorities with “people who are being a nuisance?”

No, I mean to say that police equate them.

I am a minority, and my friends are different minorities. It probably varies from place to place but this law is vestigial for us.

One problem with this is that it now ends up being at the discretion of the officer to decide whether to charge you, so it is up to their biases and beliefs whether you are indeed “friends drinking in a park” or “being a nuisance”.

Go to a bar and try to get a beer to go.

> I do not know a single person who has ever been charged with this.

My parents were charged with this soon after coming to the US - they brought a bottle of wine to a barbecue at a public park; the bottle wasn't even kept in view, but presumably some busybody still noticed and called the police.

Having unenforced laws on the books ought to be considered like a “dead code” bad smell. And this dead thing reeks. As others have mentioned, selective enforcement falls on whoever the cops feel like hassling.

They are considered that, but people are lazy and, at most, will leave a quip about it on an Internet forum, but certainly won't put in the effort to clean up where there is no apparent consequences to leaving the status quo intact.

Well in the case of drinking there is a spectrum of acceptable behavior an observer would clearly determine but a law would struggle to formally define. You could say your drinking shouldn’t be a “nuisance” in the law but that is just as subjective as the current situation.

The difference is that crimes such as disorderly conduct are subjective not just for police, but also for juries. It's not perfect, but twelve people agree that you were causing trouble at a level that rises to criminality, there's a good chance there's something to it. With open container laws, it's only subjective for the police. Once you're charged, then all they have to prove about your conduct is that you had an open drink, not the real reason they decided to go after you.

Couldn’t that also go to a jury trial?

Yes, but the jury will be asked to decide the question of whether the accused had an open container, of which there will be little doubt.

A jury could decide that it's a case of selective malicious prosecution and acquit the accused despite believing them to have committed the crime, but that's uncommon and a much bigger reach than a jury weighing whether the accused was engaged in disorderly conduct because they're charged with disorderly conduct.

the brown paper bag is specifically due to the open container law.

if you are drinking from a bag, an officer must look into the bag to know you are drinking alcohol. looking into the bag requires probable cause and a 4th amendment protected search.

Yes and police always follow the law, are truthful about what caused them to have probable cause, don’t use it to harass minorities/poor.

And when people are arrested the underfunded overworked public defenders can do a great job defending the rights of the accused.

Are you white?

No, neither I nor my friends are white :)

> A widespread law specific to the USA that doesn't seem to be a thing anywhere else in the world.

As much as it may pain a certain someone, Canada isn't the 51st state yet.

Freedom, by the way.

Australia too.

I always thought it's strange how it would be considered very Australian to go to the beach or have a beer, but completely illegal to have a beer at the beach.

I remember walking through a neighborhood in Sweden, in the town of Örebro, with a tallboy beer. I was there on an extended work trip, but had met some friends in town who invited me to social gatherings. So they said let's go to the club, we can take these drinks to go it's no problem. I assumed it was fine, since there seems to be much more tolerance and acceptance of this in Europe.

As we were walking down the road... a Volvo police car comes screaming towards us, lights and sirens going. It stops and - arguably one of the most beautiful police officers I have ever seen - approached me and started to speak in Swedish. I apologized and said sorry I do not speak Swedish, I am a visitor from the US. She chuckled and said, "Your friends are not being honest with you - you cannot drink this on the street - please pour it out". Then as quick as she stopped, she said, "We are hunting for a a shooting suspect, gotta go" and jumped back in and left.

It was the most "American" European experience I have ever had. So we can't drink on the street? And a shooting has happened? Wild.

I’m going to presume that “We are hunting for a a shooting suspect, gotta go” is what they are taught in police training to say to an American when they have to leave.

There is no evidence available that will ever change my mind.

Just a few months ago there was a fairly large shooting event in the same town, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_school_shooting

Especially in SF where you can smell someone smoking weed on pretty much any street.

In NYC esp from Chelsea to the Village you literally can't get away from the smell of weed, even indoors, as the ventilators will suck it in. I don't terribly mind, but some people really don't like it. If it was a glade plugin, I'd lose my mind, now that is a chemical weapon.

Here in Ottawa, Canada, they are planning on allowing drinking in parks this year:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/alcohol-park-pilot-pro...

Toronto did it too, and it has been fine.

https://secrettoronto.co/legal-drinking-toronto-parks/

Perhaps strong no-alcohol-in-public laws are related to weak no-guns-in-public laws.

you could open carry in California until about 2010ish

It's like the CAP theorem.

Permissive firearm policy, public drinking, free healthcare.

For some reason the US only gets one of those.

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