How's That Juvenile Curfew Workin' Out?

Now that school's out for summer, the city council's Public Safety Committee is set to be briefed in a few minutes on the one-year-ish anniversary of the 9 a.m.-2:30 p.m. curfew ordinance, passed by council on May 13, 2009, following some debate on whether or not it turned kids into...

By Robert Wilonsky

June 7, 2010

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Now that school's out for summer, the city council's Public Safety Committee is set to be briefed in a few minutes on the one-year-ish anniversary of the 9 a.m.-2:30 p.m. curfew ordinance, passed by council on May 13, 2009, following some debate on whether or not it turned kids into criminals. Here's First Assistant City Manager Ryan Evans's memo to council sent at the end of last week, in which he says, yup, seems to be so far so good: Officers doled out 673 citations during the school year, and the number of truants picked up dropped by 35 percent. And, writes Evans, 15 percent more juveniles were arrested for daytime burglaries this year than last year, even though the number of daytime burglaries has remained fairly constant.

Evans says there's no need to tweak the ordinance -- yet -- but there is one area of concern as far as city officials are, uh, concerned. Writes Evans, "there is a fairly low compliance rate that could ba addressed by follow-up telephone calls to parents, written notices to parents about non-compliance consequences, personal service of summonses to parents and more aggressive enforcement of warrants against parents."

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