The council approved an ordinance limiting the hours that minors can hang out at cybercafes and Korean-style PC baangs, and requiring the shops to install video surveillance cameras and get police permission to operate ...
The law takes effect within the next two months, reported Reuters, which adds:
In Jan. 2003, City Councilman Dennis Zine called for an investigation into cafes offering Internet access -- and in many cases aimed at young video game players -- after an incident where a brawl broke out between rival groups who had been playing the game "Counter Strike."
City officials told the council Wednesday they had identified 30 "cyber cafes" in the city, more than half of them in the San Fernando Valley. the city's northern region.
A report found that 86 percent of people arrested at cyber cafes were juveniles, and 93 percent of the arrests were for truancy or curfew violations.
Sure, network gaming gets your dander up, just ask anyone who's gone glassy-eyed and mouth-breathing pale after getting gang-blasted one time too many in their thirty-eighth round of Unreal Tournament. And those young kids - all hopped up on Red Bull, their trigger fingers a-twitchin', why they're ready to rumble when they leave those dens of digital iniquity ...
Okay, I'm starting to feel like a latter-day Henry Hill, just itchin' to break into a chorus of "Trouble with a capital-T and that rhymes with P and that stands for Pool!"
The simple fact is that when they're playing video games, kids - like adults - are generally jacked-in, gun-crazed loons, and when they unplug, it's hard to switch it off. Tell me you've never lurched away from your joystick and side-step/skulked to the kitchen, your eyes and gun hand flicking to the corners and doorways, unable to shake off that paranoid dread hunching your shoulders.
Is this a reason to pass a special ordinance targeted solely at one type of business? Not really.
If there's a real problem, it's that (sigh) parents have done a lousy job raising their kids. And that LAPD patrol officers are too overworked with real crimes like felony assaults and actual gang violence to fully enforce existing truancy and curfew laws, let alone run around inspecting PC parlors to make sure their papers are in order and no one's cutting classes at their consoles.
Nice idea, bad execution.
I predict this ordinance will be doomed to a few months of high-profile wringing out at the hands of pro-active watch commanders and trial prosecutors, and then to the sort of utter obscurity to which the vast number of L.A.'s petty vice laws have been consigned because cops - understaffed as they are - just have more important things to do.
Posted by: mack_reed on Wednesday, July 07, 2004 - 10:52 PM
