It’s summertime, and curfews are spreading through suburban America faster than Blockbuster Videos. In locales like Laurel, where the streets aren’t exactly mean, they mainly provide psychological comfort for worried parents and neighbors. But urban areas reeling from serious juvenile crime are rediscovering them, too. One fourth of the nation’s 200 largest cities imposed curfews in the 1990s; others are suddenly enforcing laws that have been on the books for years. Indianapolis cops didn’t have the manpower to enforce its 50-year-old curfew–until three teens fatally shot a cabdriver and two others stomped a youth to death this year. In Minneapolis, the Urban League runs a detention center where youth workers counsel curfew violators. Says director LaRue Fields: “They’ll say, ‘Yo, what’s up? I know your mama. Why you out here?’”
‘Martial law’: Teens are having their wings dipped in other ways as well. Towns from Fargo, N.D., to West Bend, Wis., have outlawed cruising–the traffic-jamming tradition immortalized in “American Graffiti.” In Iowa City, some stores no longer sell toilet paper or eggs to teens at night. Chicago has banned all sales of spray paint and large indelible markers–a move upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Last year San Jose, Calif., cops posed as cameramen shooting a film on graffiti–and arrested more than 50 kids who identified their handiwork. Penalties are also getting stiffer: this year some 1,300 Illinois youths have lost their driver’s licenses for underage drinking. Towns in bankrupt Orange County, Calif., have discovered a new source of funds: fining parents of delinquents. Huntington Beach charges $35.80 for every hour that curfew violators sit in police custody.
Predictably, the American Civil Liberties Union is challenging such ordinances. “It’s martial law on a small scale,” says the ACLU’s Kathy Parrent. The group argues that San Diego’s newly enforced 48-year-old 10 p.m.-to-sunrise curfew penalizes teens involved in community-service projects, like late-night soup kitchens. But many of the newer laws, like Dallas’s, exempt teens who are working, traveling with parent s or returning from community or church events.
Others complain that curfews are cosmetic. “There’s a mood among some people that if we make the town look like it doesn’t have problems, then it doesn’t have problems,” says attorney Constance Rankin in Bellevue, Pa. (population: 9,000), which imposed a curfew in June. Northeastern University criminologist James Fox puts it bluntly: “Curfews don’t work.” He argues that kids commit most crimes in the late afternoon when they are out of school and unsupervised. Still, some cities have noticed a drop in crime after curfews have been imposed-and there’s no telling how many budding delinquents have been sent home to bed. Says the Sacramento, Calif., police department’s Michael Heenan: “We’re mindful of the fact that these steely-eyed 17-year-old killers started out as 14-year-old loiterers.”
Ultimately, curfews may be most effective at protecting kids from society, rather than society from kids. In Phoenix, crimes against juveniles have dropped by about 8 percent during curfew hours. And despite the inevitable grumbling, even kids concur. Erme Pacheco, 14, of Washington, D.C., says the city’s pending curfew “won’t stop all the violence, like with kids who are already in gangs. But other kids are just starting–and this might keep them out of trouble.”
