Commerce City, CO Public Conduct: Loitering Rules (2026)

Revised Municipal Code § 12-5003, Unlawful loitering, is narrower than a general vagrancy ban: it reaches only three specific situations. First, loitering while unlawfully gambling with cards, dice, or other gambling paraphernalia. Second, loitering with one or more other people while unlawfully using, possessing, selling, or attempting to sell a controlled substance. Third, loitering with intent to interfere with or disrupt a school program, or to interfere with or endanger schoolchildren, while in a school building, on school grounds, or within 100 feet of school grounds when people under 18 are present, without any legitimate reason connected to custody of or responsibility for a student, and only after a school administrator, representative, or peace officer has asked the person to leave.

Because the section sits in Chapter 12's Article V, Offenses Against Public Peace, Order and Decency, it is prosecuted like the chapter's other public-order offenses, disorderly conduct, unlawful assembly, and disturbing the peace, under the definitions set out at § 12-1001, which borrow from the state's criminal code and its case law unless the chapter defines a term itself. The Code sets no specific fine for § 12-5003, so a conviction falls under the Municipal Code's general penalty at § 1-5: a fine up to $300, imprisonment up to 90 days, or both, with each continuing day of violation treated as a separate offense. Because the school-related prong requires a prior request to leave, an officer must first document that request before charging that portion of the section.