OPINION
Youth curfews
Youth curfews are common — but often the object of
debate, lawsuits Decades ago, a question punctuated a popular late-night
newscast in Chicago: “It’s 10:30,” the anchor would say. “Do you know
where your children are?”
It was a reminder to parents that anyone younger than
17 was supposed to be off the streets and obeying a citywide curfew —
one that remains in effect today. Back then, curfews weren’t questioned.
They just were. That’s not the case anymore.
“It’s not fair. They think all kids are bad, but we’re
not,” 13-year-old Jose Regalado said as he took a break from an evening
basketball game at a Chicago YMCA. He and other teens there complained
that police go out of their way to hassle them, even when they’re
rushing home shortly after curfew has begun.
Now even as a number of cities — from Albuquerque,
N.M., to Alpharetta, Ga. — are pushing to add them in an attempt to cut
crime, others are being hit with lawsuits that challenge their curfews’
constitutionality.
Last week in Vernon, Conn., for instance, the town
council decided not to appeal a federal court ruling that upheld a ban
on the town’s decade-old curfew. “I was happy to see it go away,” says
Dr. Ellen Marmer, a pediatric cardiologist who is also the town’s new
mayor. She says Vernon should spend its money on positive activities for
youth, including a new skateboarding park. “If you keep telling kids
‘no’ all the time and don’t give them a ‘yes’ part, they’re going to
rebel,” Marmer says. “You have to keep a balance.”
The Vernon curfew had been challenged by the
Connecticut Civil Liberties Union, which argued that curfews violated
parents’ right to set their own children’s curfew.
Andy Herm — who filed his own federal lawsuit to fight
Denver’s curfew when he was 17 — agrees, but also believes the courts
should consider young people’s rights. His 2002 lawsuit argued that
curfews violate the Fourth Amendment and its protections against
unreasonable search and seizure (in this case ID). The suit also
contended that the curfew impeded minors’ First Amendment rights during
curfew hours. “I was rather tempted to hold a protest against the curfew
after curfew hours,” says Herm, now 19 and a sophomore at the University
of British Columbia in Vancouver. He raised the $150 to file the suit by
collecting donations, a dollar at a time, from students at school. And
his dad, an attorney, explained how to file the suit. In the end,
however, it was thrown out because — besides having to obey a curfew if
their cities have one — minors in Colorado are not allowed to file
lawsuits.
Either way, at least one legal expert says he would
have been surprised if the court sided with a teen. “We don’t have a
country where people take very seriously the idea that young people
deserve a lot of freedom,” says Martin Guggenheim, a professor at New
York University School of Law who specializes in children’s rights.
Police, meanwhile, argue that curfews help reduce
juvenile crime (a claim some researchers dispute) and keep young people
from becoming victims of crime. Albuquerque’s mayor, for instance, began
asking lawmakers for a statewide curfew after a 16-year-old was shot in
a park in the early morning hours last August.
“If you’re 16 or younger, you belong in the house, not
standing on a street corner,” says Chicago police spokesman Pat Camden,
whose department caught 40,335 curfew violators last year.
Many Chicago residents support the curfew. They
include Kathy Posner, a retiree who serves on her neighborhood’s police
advisory board. “Unfortunately, many parents in lower-income areas work
at night and are not around to correctly supervise their teenage
children,” she says.
Mike Males, a sociologist at the University of
California, Santa Cruz, says that, indeed, there is a perception that
curfews make a city safer. But his research has found that juvenile
crime rates in such cities as San Francisco actually went down when
curfews were abolished.
He says curfews also tend to punish kids who aren’t
doing anything wrong — and often disproportionately target black and
Hispanic youth.
In Vernon, Conn., he found that of 410 youth cited for
violating curfew from 1995 to 1998, only seven were committing crimes,
served with warrants or identified as runaways.
By Martha Irvine
2 February 2004
http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/nation/7831398.htm
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