Pompano Beach, FL Public Conduct: Loitering Rules (2026)

12, most recently amended by Ord. 2017-18 in January 2017, defines disorderly conduct as acting with a purpose to cause a breach of the peace, public danger, disorder, or nuisance, or with knowledge that the conduct reasonably will create one. The section lists specific ways a person commits the offense, including subsection (C), being found at any time in unoccupied buildings or lodging in the open air and unable to give a reasonable account for being so found, and subsection (D), being found in gaming houses or disorderly houses, or loitering around any dock, railroad depot, bank, auction room, barroom, hotel, store, shop, car, thoroughfare, public conveyance, public building, private dwelling house, gambling house, house of ill-fame, or public place, and unable to give a reasonable account for being so found.

The 'unable to give a reasonable account' language means the offense turns on the person's response when questioned, not on presence at the location alone; someone who can explain their purpose for being at a listed location has a defense built into the statute's text. Other subsections of the same section separately criminalize creating unlawful crowds that annoy others, refusing a lawful police dispersal order, willful assaults or fights in public, and gambling or fraud schemes, showing the loitering provision sits inside a broader public-peace statute rather than standing alone.

Subsection (H) is an explicit First Amendment carve-out: the section does not apply to constitutionally protected speech that does not otherwise violate other laws, which limits the loitering prong from reaching peaceful assembly, picketing, or expressive activity at the very locations the statute lists. 19, bars loitering within 20 feet of the municipal holding and detention area and providing contraband to prisoners, but that section governs jail-adjacent conduct, not general public loitering.