That’s when 16-year-old Naima Liggon was stabbed to death by another 16-year-old girl outside a McDonald’s near 14th and U Streets NW just after 2 a.m. Precious life was lost in an argument apparently over sweet-and-sour sauce. If curfew enforcement had been underway, would Naima still be with us today? Would both girls have been at home?
True, there are plenty of other locations where fighting could have taken place. And, of course, stabbings can occur at any time of day. But the police were obviously on to something when they identified the U Street corridor as a target location for enforcement of a midnight curfew on weekends (and 11 p.m. on weekdays). For those reasons, the curfew will also be enforced in Chinatown and Navy Yard; on streets around Howard University and Banneker Recreation Center; on 14th Street between Otis Place and Spring Road NW in Columbia Heights; on the 4000 block of Georgia Avenue NW; on the 4400 through 4600 blocks of Benning Road SE and on the 1300 block of Congress Street SE.
Time will tell whether this pilot curfew program will reduce the toll of crime on our youths. Thirteen boys and girls younger than 18 have been killed so far in D.C. this year. More than 80 youths have been shot. Hundreds of minors have been charged with crimes of violence — all numbers that have increased since this time last year.
True, not all crimes were committed after 11 p.m. But enough goes wrong, at least in the mayor’s view, to get unsupervised youths under 17 off the streets late at night.
“The vast majority of our young people are doing the right thing — they are back in school, they are involved in extracurriculars, and in the evenings and at night, they are where they need to be — supervised and safe. But we need that to be true for all of our young people, and if we have kids and teenagers who are not in safe situations, we need to connect with those families,” Bowser (D) said. “I’ve shared before that when I was young, my father used to tell me: There’s nothing good in the street after 11 o’clock. We want our kids home, we want them safe, and if they’re not, we want families working with us to get their kids the help that they need.”
Bowser rightly recognizes the risks of curfew stoking up tensions between the police and affected residents. Curfew violators won’t be taken to police stations. Instead, they will be transported to the Youth Services Center, where their families can come get them. This is also an opportunity to confront the reality that many D.C. youths getting in trouble are often in troubled families. Under this pilot program, the center will connect both parent and child with the kind of help and rehabilitation services they might need.
All of which is a good idea — on paper. But does the city have the capacity to make it work?
This spring, the Youth Services Center reached such an extreme state with staff shortages that young people were reportedly confined to hours-long lockdowns in their rooms, beyond legal limits. Problems also were so severe that administrative or maintenance staff were substituting for trained youth development workers. The mayor’s office assured me the facility can now handle all detained youths. But the center is an 88-bed facility. As of Thursday, 78 beds were filled. Will additional space be made available to accommodate the influx of curfew violators?
In response to a D.C. official’s argument that “love” serves as the basis for Youth Services Center detention policy and practices, a juvenile justice advocate said, “There is no definition of love that encompasses the trauma, violence and general lack that our kids are being subjected to at YSC.” But that was then. Bowser and her team had better not let that be the case now. The youth curfew initiative should be aimed toward producing less, not more, agony.
It doesn’t end there. Fighting juvenile crime now has an added dimension. The Post reports that Matthew M. Graves, U.S. attorney for the District, has instructed his prosecutors to “strongly” weigh the possibility of charging young people ages 16 and 17 as adults in cases where they are accused of multiple robberies. Graves’s approach to juvenile justice runs up against that of D.C. Attorney General Brian L. Schwalb (D), who is tasked with prosecuting D.C.’s juvenile offenders. Schwalb has said in the past: “I don’t think kids should be treated as adults. Kids are kids, and when you’re talking about teenagers particularly — their brains are developing, their minds are developing, and they’re biologically prone to make mistakes.” Graves counters that robbery “sprees and patterns are not impetuous crimes of a juvenile who temporarily lost control.” He wants them considered for adult court prosecution.
Which view wins or loses in the long run is undecided. But count on it: For now, pressure on teens out overnight — whether up to “nothing good” or not — is ramping up. The theory of safer streets and better lives is the right one. Now we will see how it plays out in practice.
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