The crimes of playing in Bangor

It looks as though a Bangor resident’s complaint about the curbside basketball games in her neighborhood is causing city officials to suddenly jump through hoops unnecessarily.

In case you missed the story in yesterday’s paper, the City Council’s government operations committee is being forced to review for the first time in nearly 40 years a largely ignored ordinance regarding the use of city streets as playgrounds after a woman complained of the “nerve-wracking” basketball games taking place near her home.

The wording of the ordinance is a curiously long-winded litany of just about every conceivable offense that children might have perpetrated back in 1967, including the crime of public archery. It reads: “No person shall play baseball or any ball with a bat or engage in ball playing of any kind or throw any stone, brick, bats, clubs or snowballs or shoot any arrow or use any sling or other device to throw missiles or fly any kite in any street, lane or public square within the built-up portion of Bangor.”

That just about covers all the bases in the realm of childhood recreation, don’t you think?

The city’s flexible practice in recent years, aside from asking people each fall to remove the portable hoops from the curbs and streets to allow snowplows to pass, has been to enforce the ordinance only when situations arose that merited action. And while Police Chief Don Winslow said at the meeting that he couldn’t come out and condone the use of neighborhood streets as playgrounds, neither he nor Assistant Chief Peter Arno could recall a single accident in 20 or so years with the department involving a child playing ball and a passing automobile.

So what’s the problem, then, that would necessitate reworking an ordinance that is rarely enforced and seems to fulfill its function just fine when called upon? Judging from the testimony at the meeting, there clearly is some bad blood between the woman who complained about the noise of the games and the neighborhood youngsters who feel they should be allowed to continue playing them. If this is an isolated incident, rather than evidence of a growing citywide problem, then perhaps it would be best to treat it as such rather than consider the possibility of changing the law to prohibit all of the portable curbside hoops in the city. There are about 200 of them out there, after all, which would suggest that an awful lot of kids would suddenly be deprived of a healthy and good-natured form of recreation because of a feud on one residential street. Besides, don’t the police have more important things to do than cruise the neighborhoods to bust street-playing young scofflaws?

Wouldn’t it be better if the neighbors in Little City could get together with a police officer or councilor as a mediator and try to iron out their differences on their own? Perhaps they could self-impose a curfew on the games that would be amenable to all, scale down the noise level and the profanity, and find a way to ease the tension that appears to go deeper than a simple pickup basketball game on a steamy summer’s night.

As for the ordinance itself, why mess with success? Though seldom enforced, it still serves as a handy deterrent after all these years. Think about it: When was the last time you drove through a Bangor neighborhood and saw youngsters in the street playfully firing stones, bricks, arrows or other missiles at one another?

See what I mean?