Brooklyn, New York, would be the fifth largest city in the United States, but for the fact that it’s a part of New York City.  Still, Brooklyn has a culture all its own.  It has its own language, natives and practices.  It has its own set of norms.  One of these is the sanctity of the stoop.

For those heathens who are unfamiliar with the stoop, allow me to explain.  Brooklyn is a city of brownstones, each of which has a set of stairs leading from the main floor of the brownstone to the sidewalk.  Picture a split level, with the lower level two or three steps down from the ground and the upper level about nine steps up.  That’s why the need a stoop.

In the land of Brooklyn, a stoop is very much a material part of a brownstone.  It’s where the denizens sit to watch the world go by.  It’s where children play stoop ball (yes, there’s a well-known game attached to stoops).  On a hot summer evening, the stoop is where people go to escape the heat.   One sits on one’s own stoop, and not on anyone else’s stoop, unless personally invited to do so.  That’s the rule.

Now, the sanctity of the stoop has been put in issue, by none other than the New York City police.  According to the New York Times:

Kimber VanRy was sitting on his stoop in the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn, drinking a beer and sending e-mail messages on his BlackBerry, when a police car slowed to a stop on the street in front of him.

The time was 11:52 p.m., the date was Aug. 27, and the beer, for the record, was a 12-ounce bottle of Sierra Nevada.

The police officer in the driver’s seat said something to Mr. VanRy. He left the stoop, walked to the car and, several minutes later, was handed a small pink slip — a $25 summons for drinking in public.

This attack on sovereignty has raised quite a stir in Brooklyn.  The implications of this full frontal assault on the sacred stoop could undermine the very fabric of Brooklyn society.

Many of the laws in New York are based on, or aggravated by, performing an act in public.  It applies to smoking pot as well as drinking a beer.  But what constitutes “public” is hardly clear.

The city’s open-container law prohibits anyone from drinking an alcoholic beverage, or possessing and intending to drink from an open container containing an alcoholic beverage, “in any public place.” The law defines a public place as one “to which the public or a substantial group of persons has access, including, but not limited to,” a sidewalk, street or park.

In Brooklyn, the public has no access to a person’s stoop.  That’s Brooklyn law, and everybody there knows it.  That’s not to say that everybody walking past the stoop can’t see everything that’s happening on the stoop.  Obviously, then can.  And that’s not to say that kids who think they won’t get caught will climb on someone else’s stoop, or sit down and rest there until the homeowner yells at them and chases them away with a broom.  But then it’s the kids who are breaking the rules.  Everybody knows that.

Since the stoop is part of the owner’s private property, is it a public place or a private place? 

Richard Briffault, a professor at Columbia University Law School and an expert in property and local government law, said Mr. VanRy’s summons illustrated the thin line between private and public property. “It’s quite possible to be on private property and in public at the same time,” he said.

Well that helps.  Not.  The issue isn’t a matter of mere “private property,” such as a mall or facility where the public is invited in.  This is a stoop.  This is Brooklyn.  This isn’t theoretical, but a matter of long-standing right.

Indeed, last year, a State Supreme Court justice in the Bronx ruled that an apartment building lobby qualified as a “public place” in relation to the open-container law. A police officer had confronted a man who was drinking a beer in the lobby of a building on the Grand Concourse, and Justice Joseph J. Dawson ruled that the officer had probable cause to arrest him.

But that was the Bronx, and all the rules are different in the Bronx.  After all, the law in the Bronx is that police can do anything anywhere to anyone.  There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in the Bronx.  Everybody knows that.

There is no real explanation as to why the officer felt compelled to write VanRy up.  Is there a plague of stoop-drinkers wreaking havoc on Brooklyn?  Not as far as anyone is aware.  I surmise that this was an officer recently transfered from some other borough, unfamiliar with the ways of Brooklyn and who ignorantly stepped into a pile of Brooklyn’s finest. 

But one thing is clear: No matter what the NYPD does, no matter what the court does with VanRy’s summons, the good people of Brooklyn will not succumb to the homogenization of their homeland and the usurpation of their stoop.  If they want to stop Brooklynites from having a cold one on their stoop, they can pry it out of their cold, dead fingers.