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Dover councilman withdraws proposed loitering ordinance after pushback

Milton Pratt
/
Delaware Public Media

The Dover City Councilman behind a proposal to adopt a city-wide loitering ordinance withdrew his proposal last week after significant pushback and the resignation of the proposal's co-sponsor.

Dover’s loitering ordinance currently applies only in city parks. Councilman David Anderson’s proposal would have applied the ordinance to the entire city, allowing police officers to issue fines instead of using the state’s loitering law, which both imposes a fine and creates a permanent criminal record.

Anderson says his proposal offered a more lenient enforcement option to the Dover PD, which made fewer than a dozen arrests based on the state’s loitering law in 2022. Anderson adds Delaware’s Department of Justice has not consistently prosecuted those cited for loitering under the state law.

"We wanted [enforcement] to be done in a more efficient fashion that isn’t dependent on which Deputy Attorney General is on duty that day," he said.

Anderson’s proposal received support from some downtown business owners but faced opposition from local homeless services providers and the ACLU of Delaware, which argued the change would largely impact people experiencing homelessness who can’t afford to pay fines. When those fines go unpaid, the city sends them to a collections agency, potentially damaging a person's credit.

Anderson argues that the consequences of unpaid state fines are far more dire. "If the state fines pile up, you can get a warrant," he said. "That doesn't happen with a city fine, because we don't turn those over to the state."

Without the votes to adopt the ordinance — in part because the ordinance's co-sponsor, Councilman Ralph Taylor, resigned from the council at the end of January — Anderson withdrew it last week.

He says Dover Police will likely begin enforcing the state’s loitering law more frequently. Dover’s most recent budget includes funding to increase the visible police presence downtown - the area at the center of the loitering debate.

"Our dedicated officers will be downtown soon, and they’re just going to have to enforce the state code," he said. "For better or worse, that’s just the reality."

Meanwhile, the ACLU of Delaware is also lobbying Attorney General Kathy Jennings to decriminalize loitering at the state level.

"Every person in a free society has a right to exist in public spaces, and this proposal was in direct violation of that right," said ACLU of Delaware Policy and Advocacy Director Javonne Rich. "We ask all government officials to invest in developing approaches that decriminalize innocent behaviors that are often the byproducts of poverty and homelessness."

Some Delaware municipalities have far stricter prohibitions on loitering. Millsboro's code, for instance, treats "vagrancy" as a misdemeanor, effectively prohibiting homelessness altogether.

Paul Kiefer comes to Delaware from Seattle, where he covered policing, prisons and public safety for the local news site PubliCola.