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But policing pay phones negatively impacted those who need them most. In an effort to make pay-phone environments feel safer, cities tended to implement rules that require special permits for pay-phone installation. This prohibited them from being placed on the premises of certain businesses seen to harbor crime, like liquor stores or gas stations, or facilitated their quick removal if deemed a public nuisance. The efforts led to fewer pay phones in impoverished areas, making them inaccessible to their most-likely users.

The restrictions on pay phones persist today, even after most of the phones have disappeared. They are often tied to legislation that calls for public order. Depending on the city, pay-phone regulations are placed under ordinances relating to loitering, public nuisance, vending and soliciting, or vandalism. These laws are vague and expansive in language, and they disproportionately affect minorities. They force communities to do their own patrolling, and often invite implicit racial biases to drive suspicion of illicit activity. Neighbors and shop owners might view public-phone callers, often low-income people of color, as potential criminals, leading them to advocate for the removal of pay phones.

Some cities that have passed initiatives to remove pay phones due to their perceived role in crime are Baltimore, Toledo, and Jacksonville—even well after mobile phones became commonplace. These concerns spread beyond urban centers, too. Budding suburban communities sometimes write pay-phone restrictions into their town charters, their residents fearing pay phone-facilitated gang activity that might into their safe havens.

In Chapter I, Article 4 of the Los Angeles municipal code, public telephones are banned on the site of any public-benefit project. This includes police stations, one of the areas where pay phones are still frequently used. If discharged without money or a cell phone, a person recently released from court may need to place a collect call to contact their family. The pay phone is also an important tool for many migrants. The American Public Communication Council claims that long-distance rates on pay phones are often lower than those on a basic cell phone plan, making the pay phone a vital tool to contact family and friends abroad. With the pay phone still crucial for these communities, people on the poverty line without access to a landline might hang around a pay phone waiting for an important call—unwittingly finding themselves in violation of the law.

After the passage of loitering laws in Chicago, some 40,000 people were arrested between 1992 and 1999 for congregating in groups of two or more. The majority of those arrested were black and Latino men in low-income neighborhoods. The Illinois Supreme Court called Chicago’s loitering law unconstitutional, and it was eventually replaced with a variant of New York City’s stop-and-frisk program, another controversial method of identifying potential criminals. The American Civil Liberties Union reported that, in 2013, stop-and-frisk reached a peak of 685,724 incidents. The law was deemed to be used excessively and unconstitutionally that year. The number of arrests has since plummeted, though thousands of searches continue. Last year, more than 75 percent of those stopped were innocent, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union.