Is it illegal to drink beer on your front porch?
What a silly question, right?
What right do the Metropolitan Police have to tell you that you can't sit on
your stoop and enjoy a beer, or a glass of wine, or whatever pleases you?
Well, in the past, some MPD officers have thought that they
could charge you with POCA – Possession of an Open Container of Alcohol – if you
did that, right there in front of your own home. I was dismayed to hear, at the
PSA 302 (Columbia Heights) meeting on February 12, 2009, an MPD sergeant assert
exactly that, noting only that “the law isn't enforced”.
Sorry, sergeant:
it's not so. It was, once, maybe, depending upon an extreme interpretation
of the POCA law. This turned into a big District dispute in 1997, when
overzealous police used this law to harass residents drinking beer or wine on
the front porches of their homes.
Here's the POCA law:
DC Code § 25-1001. Drinking of
alcoholic beverage in public place prohibited; intoxication
prohibited.
(a) Except as provided in subsections
(b) and (c) of this section, no person in the District shall drink an
alcoholic beverage or possess in an open container an alcoholic
beverage in or upon any of the following places:
1. A street, alley, park, sidewalk, or parking
area;
2. A vehicle in or upon any street, alley, park, or
parking area;
This is to prohibit your neighborhood
alcoholics from making our streets, sidewalks, and public parks into drinking
areas. Fair enough. But how does your front porch come under this regulation?
This has to do with a topic I've
mentioned elsewhere:
that many DC streets are, on paper, wider than
they are in actuality, as if anticipating adding more lanes sometime
in the future. This is
commonplace in Mount Pleasant, where side streets south of Park Road are
commonly 90-foot rights of way. Take out 30 feet for the actual roadbed, and 12
feet on either side for sidewalk, and there's 36 feet left over. On either side
of the road, 18 feet from the sidewalk is actually, legally, “public space”,
coming under a battery of special regulations. Front porches commonly extend out
into this “public space”. Similarly, in Columbia Heights, a number of
residential streets east of 14th Street, including Newton, Oak, and Otis, for
example, are 70-foot rights of way. Take out the 30 feet of roadbed, and 10 feet
on either side for sidewalks, and 10 feet of these residential front yards are
“public space”, though fenced off and treated as private front yards.
It seems that, in 1997, the police decided that
porches built out onto such so-called “parkings” (the name meaning not that they
were for parking cars, but that they should be kept as parkland) were fair game.
Most famously, a woman with a glass of wine on her front porch in the 1500 block
of Q Street Northwest was arrested, and became known as the “Chardonnay
Lady”. Other residents
of the Dupont Circle area were later charged with POCA for having alcoholic beverages on
their front porches, as the police ignored the outrage caused by that first
arrest. This seems to have been part of a “zero tolerance” sweep, as some police
think that if they strictly enforce every law they can think of, harassing even
innocent residents, then robbers and burglars will be intimidated into good
behavior. (Not so: robbers and burglars are perfectly happy to see the police
focus their attention on minor offenders, leaving them free to do their more
serious crimes. But all those arrests make the police, frustrated in their inability
to catch real criminals, feel as if they're doing something useful.)
Arresting residents for having drinks on their front
porches was clearly not the intent of the law, and Councilmember Carol Schwarz
led the effort to close this loophole that allowed the police to harass
residents. The following text was added to the DC Code in 1998:
§ 25-1001(b) Subsection
(a)(1) of this section shall not apply if drinking or possession of
an alcoholic beverage occurs:
(1) In or on a structure which
projects upon the parking, and which is an integral, structural part,
of a private residence, such as a front porch, terrace, bay window,
or vault; and
(2) By, or with the permission of,
the owner or resident.
Note the reference to “the
parking”, which is the “public space” I described
above, and which is the loophole taken by the police to make our
front porches qualify as “public places”. This closes off
that loophole, and ever since then the answer is yes, you can have a
beer on your front porch, even if it happens to be a “parking”
and lies on “public space”.
What if you're in your front yard, and your front
yard is a “parking”? Well, then you're in trouble. But maybe our Metropolitan
Police will figure out that harassing residents is not, in fact, an effective
anti-crime measure. Not all of them have, as this PSA 302 sergeant
illustrates. Our police have to realize that they're supposed to be guardians of the public, and not
guard dogs riding herd on the public, as if we're inmates of an enormous open-air
prison. Some of them have difficulty with that distinction.
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Page created February 15, 2009