City Council may vote on a pilot curfew program later this
month. If I were on City Council, I’d vote no.
The motivation for the curfew (one of the motivations,
anyway) may be a good one. The theory is that youths under 18 who are out on
the streets late at night are likely to have family problems or behavior
problems and that through a curfew, we could identify those youths and get help
for them.
Police would take youths to a center operated by the
Hillside Family of Agencies, where Hillside staff would
evaluate them and then call parents or guardians. And Hillside
would refer the families to appropriate agencies if they needed help.
The hope was that the curfew would be in place in July.
We’re now in mid-August, and city officials are still working on the plan.
For good reason. A curfew is no simple thing. Young people
have rights, and we can’t just take those rights away willy nilly.
In addition, it’s better than an even bet that the curfew
will be selectively enforced, and that carries potential risks as well. (Maybe there’ll be as much emphasis on
looking for teenagers hanging out in the Park Avenue or
Browncroft neighborhoods as in the predominantly black and Latino inner city,
but I doubt it.)
City officials say the curfew isn’t designed to criminalize
the youths who violate the curfew. But police will have the names of these
young people. What kinds of records will be kept? What will happen to them?
And what will police do if young people refuse to go with them
when asked to? Will they forcibly take them to the Hillside
center? Isn’t that placing them “under arrest”?
Then there’s the simple issue of practicality: a teenager
who wants to stay out past 11 at night will figure out, pretty quickly, how to
do that. Backyards and porches may replace the street corner for gathering
places.
Beyond that, there’s the question of the curfew’s purpose.
The community is frantic to stop the violence taking place on Rochester’s
inner-city streets. But a curfew won’t do much to stem that violence: very few
of the victims or perpetrators of that violence have been under 18, and few of
the crimes involving children and teenagers have taken place in the middle of
the night.
Could a curfew identify troubled young people before they
embark on a career of violence and get help for them? Maybe. But if providing
help is the goal, a curfew doesn’t seem like the best — or even the most
logical — way to go about it.
First of all, the front line in the curfew will be some of
the city’s most expensive human resources: cops. And there are numerous
problems with that, even aside from the cost. We’ll be taxing police during the
time of day we most need them for serious calls: the middle of the night. We’ll
be asking cops to deal with teenagers, whose emotions are notoriously volatile.
Perhaps most
important: for the curfew to be successful, we’ll have to do much more than
pick kids up off the street, try to find their parents, and provide referrals
to service agencies. The long-term goal is to do more, but so far, many of the
other important pieces aren’t in place. To provide real help will require major
involvement by a wide array of government, health, and social-service agencies
who deal with families and children. That hasn’t been lined up yet.
Maybe this pilot program will tell us something we don’t
know. Maybe it will give us a sense of the kinds of services these families
need.
It’s likely, though, that many of the teenagers we want to
help are already known to service providers: to child-protective personnel, to
settlement houses, to teachers and principals and school counselors, to police
and probation officers.
John Klofas, head of RIT’s criminal justice department,
thinks that in a city the size of Rochester,
it’s possible to design a program that will help the young people who need
help.
Klofas, who has just been named to head a new PublicSafetyInitiativesCenter for the city, has studied Rochester’s
violence problem for years. “If you’re serious about violence prevention,” he says,
“you’ve got to identify the risk group.” In Rochester,
that risk group consists of black males between the ages of 15 and 30 in the
inner city.
And, says Klofas, we’re going to have to have “a radical
redesign of social services in this community.”
“You can easily underestimate the implications for the
design of a social-service system,” says Klofas. “You’ll run into kids who
you’ve taken off the street, and you’ll find they don’t have a home, or their
home sucks, and now they’re yours.”
“The curfew will have an effect of not letting you parcel
out kids to agencies,” he says. “It will make you confront how dramatic the
kids’ problems are.”
All of this, he says, “is going to highlight the fact that
we have a population that needs to be managed very closely in terms of
services.”
“We’ve underestimated the level of intervention and the
level of seriousness of the problems” of the so-called “at risk” teenagers,
says Klofas. “I don’t know who is in a position to pay for them.”
Ah, yes. Who indeed?
There’s the rub. With a financially strapped county, a
financially strapped city, financially strapped social-service agencies:
where’ll the money for intensive services come from?
Can existing agencies do a better job? I don’t know. Can we
spend our service dollars — taxes and charitable donations — more wisely? I
don’t know.
But I do know that we have a lot of young people who need
help. We all know that. The curfew is an attempt to help them. And maybe it’s
better than nothing. My fear is that it won’t help much, though —and that
it’ll make us think we’re doing a lot. And that then we won’t look for a better
solution.
Playing the wimp card
The Bush administration, Republican leaders, and their best
buddy, Independent Democrat Joe Lieberman, lost no time in trying to turn last
week’s terrorism news to their advantage.
The new line: Democrats in Congress and Democratic
candidates who oppose the war in Iraq
are soft and don’t want to protect Americans from terrorism. National Republican
Party Chair Ken Mehlman has taken to calling Democrats “Defeat-o-crats.” Lieberman
says that terrorists who want to blow up airplanes are happy that he lost and
Ned Lamont won.
So let’s just state the facts:
There was no connection between Iraq
and Al Qaeda. We did not have to go — and should not have gone — to war in Iraq.
And saying so doesn’t make you pro-terrorist.
The people who oppose the war — 60 percent of Americans,
according to recent poll — are not all Democrats. Those of us in that 60
percent don’t want terrorism, and it’s beyond insulting to say that we do.
The Republicans are trying to act tough. But acting tough is
what got us into the mess in Iraq.
What we need now is intelligence, something this administration and many in
Congress are sadly lacking.
This article appears in Aug 16-22, 2006.
