The D.C. Council voted Tuesday to approve a long-term youth curfew measure, but it may not take effect for several weeks or even months, depending on how quickly Congress signs off.
Council members also chose not to take up the emergency curfew today. That means as summer break approaches, the mayor and police chief’s authority to set temporary youth curfew zones will expire in 10 days.
The D.C. Council has been going back and forth over youth curfew zones for months now.
While they agreed to extend that authority in the long-term, they could not seem to agree on whether it was a good idea to do it right away.
This comes after so-called “teen takeovers” throughout the District, where large groups of young people have been gathering at night in busy neighborhoods like Navy Yard or U Street. Oftentimes, these takeovers are advertised on social media.
Last month, D.C. police say they arrested eight young people in one weekend, some of them for fighting and one for brandishing a knife. It is part of why the D.C. Council has approved a number of temporary measures in the past to give the mayor and police chief the authority to declare a temporary youth curfew zone — where young people are not allowed to gather after 8 p.m. in groups of nine or more.
Several D.C. councilmembers have said they feel the curfew zones are needed to keep people safe.
“This is a limited authority that should absolutely be extended,” Councilmember Brooke Pinto, who is also running for D.C. delegate, told News4. “To me, it’s kind of like saying if there’s a riot, we should enable and empower our own local police department to be able to respond. Why on earth we wouldn’t want to do that in these instances is not something I can understand.”
But News4 also talked to some folks who protested the curfew zones Tuesday because they feel it criminalizes young people.
“Criminalizing young people is sending a very clear message that they don’t matter to us as a society, and that’s just not the reality,” Kristi Matthews Jones with DC Girls’ Coalition told News4. “If you don’t invest in young people now, you’re not going to set them up in a way to succeed in the future.”
“A lot of youth don’t feel safe at home or safe in the city, and so they organize with their friends, and you know, they may go out and, quote, unquote, you know, do bad things, but that’s not a reason to criminalize them. That’s a reason to help them,” said D.C. college student Arayah Shelton.
Under the permanent legislation that just passed, the city must offer some sort of youth activity in the same area where the curfew zone is being put in place, and there would be limits on how much police can interact with the young people before the curfew starts.
The bill would also push back the city wide youth curfew from 11 p.m. to 12 a.m. on summer weekends, and it would refer to young people as youths instead of juveniles because of what the bill describes as negative historical connotations around the word juvenile.
Violating the curfew is not a criminal offense, so D.C. police would not arrest a young person for that alone — they would have to also be committing a crime like assault or theft in order to be arrested. According to D.C. police, their policy is to ask young people violating the curfew to move along. If they refuse, then police may detain them and either try to get their parents to come pick them up or give them a ride home.
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