Gulfport, MS Public Conduct: Loitering Rules (2026)

Section 6-420 sits in the article of the traffic chapter Gulfport carried forward from the 1963 Code (section 21-7) to regulate the railroads running through the city rather than city streets generally. ' The article around it addresses only railroad-specific hazards: locomotives must sound a bell or whistle approaching a crossing (section 6-416), no one may jump on or off a moving railcar (section 6-418) or climb an unattended boxcar without authority (section 6-419), and a railroad company must erect crossing lights and automatic signals at busy grade crossings (sections 6-422, 6-423).

Section 6-420's loitering ban belongs to that same rail-safety purpose: keeping people, especially children playing, off active yard and siding track where a switching movement or standing car creates a hazard that isn't obvious from a public street. Mississippi's own vagrancy statute is cross-referenced in the annotation to section 6-420, Miss. § 97-35-37(d), which separately criminalizes loitering 'in the vicinity of' a railroad station, showing the local ordinance tracks a state-law concern about rail-adjacent trespass rather than creating a broader municipal loitering power. Gulfport's code contains no equivalent general-purpose loitering ordinance for sidewalks, parking lots or business districts; the closest analogues are the curfew ordinance for minors in section 7-9, which bars a minor from 'remaining' in a public place during posted nighttime hours, and the special-event no-parking rule in section 6-333, which bars loitering only inside a posted event-closure area. Outside those narrow contexts, a person standing or waiting in a Gulfport public place commits no separate loitering offense.