Disorderly conduct laws are a combination of common law offenses aimed at protecting the public order, peace, and tranquility. Yet, contrary to common legal conceptions, the criminalization of disorderly conduct is not just about policing behavior that threatens to disrupt public order or even the public’s peace and tranquility. Policing disorderly conduct reflects and reinforces deeply rooted discriminatory understandings about what behavior—and which persons—violate community norms. By relying on a false dichotomy between “order” and “disorder,” disorderly conduct laws construct and reinforce a hierarchy of normative behaviors that are imbued with racism, sexism, and ableism. Disorderly conduct laws “otherize” certain nonconforming behaviors, delegitimize them through the label of “disorderly,” and in doing so exclude certain historically marginalized groups from normative conceptions of community. They do this in part by prohibiting a wide range of behaviors and conferring vast amounts of discretion upon law enforcement and private citizens to target individuals for behavior regulation, physical removal, and community exclusion. These laws often determine access to shared community spaces, resulting in the exclusion of historically marginalized groups from these purportedly “public” spaces. In this way, disorderly conduct laws delineate and police the normative boundaries of communities.

This Article begins by offering an overview and substantive critique of disorderly conduct laws. It then demonstrates how enforcement of these laws reinforces social hierarchies on the basis of race, gender, and disability and defines and constructs community boundaries. In this way, the Article offers a site for problematizing unitary models of community in criminal law and is situated within criminal legal scholarship’s ongoing discussions on the role of “the community” in criminal justice reform. The Article concludes by identifying pathways to end the harms of the disorderly conduct enforcement regime, including decriminalizing and abolishing disorderly conduct. Instead of honing in on specific policy reforms, the Article aims to set forth certain models that rely less on consensus and more on contestatory approaches to democratic participation, which better account for the multiplicity of communities affected by criminal law enforcement.