The Moves That Matter by Jonathan Rowson

Author:Jonathan Rowson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

28. TRAGIC SAFETY

Chess is sometimes viewed as culturally transgressive. Our game was, for instance, outlawed in Iran until recently because it was considered to be a form of gambling, which was deemed haram. However, it takes a special set of circumstances for chess to be considered a threat to public safety.

On the afternoon of 20 October 2011 in New York City, a group of seven men were playing chess at purpose-built chess tables inside a children’s play area called Emerson Playground in Inwood Hill Park in Manhattan. According to the New York parks department, there are about 2,000 public chess tables spread across 536 parks. Children in play areas are usually too young to want to play chess, so it is a curious design decision to include the boards near the swings and chutes. Perhaps the idea was that parents or guardians would play each other, but this does not chime with my experience of parenting, because the risk of getting lost in a chess game is that you’ll lose sight of your child. Moreover, there was a fence separating the chessboards from the main play area, and on this particular day there were no children around.

While the men were hanging out in that place, blissfully absorbed in evading checks, making captures and pressing clocks, an NYC police patrol vehicle rolled up to the gate of the park. Several officers approached the men and charged them with occupying the area unaccompanied by any children, in violation of a regulation ‘1–03’ about ignoring park rules, in this case a rule meant to safeguard areas designed for children from adult use, and indirectly help to protect children from paedophiles.

The players were summoned to court, to face possible trial. Some settled the case, which meant their charges would be fully dismissed provided they were not arrested in the following six months, but two of the defendants successfully sought a dismissal without any exceptions and won, albeit on the technicality that the arresting officer had referred to irrelevant laws in his paperwork documenting the arrest.

I found this case curiously troubling, because there is a lot going on under the surface and it is hard to fathom what it all means. I am a father and have been a school governor, so I understand that safeguarding children is a duty of paramount importance; system rules that help with that objective are generally welcome. However, we can only do so much to protect children before preventive measures become absurd, undermine our quality of life, and damage the kind of free and trustworthy world that we want to bring children in to.

It is also true that if you have rules, however minor, you had better enforce them now and again, lest the very idea of rules loses its authority. Still, it is vexing to think that seven men playing chess should be summoned to court for what appears to be nothing more than being in a place where children might have been.

The other aspect of this story

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