Twelfth-grader Enrique Otero is used to bullets flying and kids causing trouble after dark on Kensington Street. So he says he’s OK with a proposed curfew for kids his age.
The proposal comes from neighborhood Alderwoman Joyce Chen. She’s still working on it, with encouragement from district cops and adults who work with kids, like pastor Sean Englehart of Safe Christian Fellowship at the corner of Elm Street and Kensington Street, in the epicenter of a spike in youth violence over the past year.
“The police should be a last resort. But something needs to be done. Kids are out at all crazy hours in this neighborhood,” Englehart said.
New Haven already has a curfew on its books. But it’s out of date and unenforceable. Passed in 1928, Sec. 18 – 16 of the city Code of Ordinances prohibits children younger than 14 from “loiter[ing] upon any street, alley or public place within the corporate limits of the city between the hours of eight o’clock (8:00) p.m. and three o’clock (3:00) a.m., unless accompanied by his parent or guardian.” Parents and guardians faced $50 fines for each violation by their children, according to the law.
However, such curfew laws have been rendered obsolete by Supreme Court rulings that require cities to add many exceptions (for instance, for children returning from a religious service). Also, the times dictated in the original law reflect a farming economy.
Chen (shown in photo participating in a neighborhood parent patrol) said she doesn’t have the details worked out yet of her proposal to update the ordinance. “The idea is that the police partner with a volunteer and scout the streets for young people,” she said. “They will escort these young people back home, where they will give a ‘warning’ to the parent. The second time they have to escort the child home, [parents] will get a ticket.
“My idea, since I’m not fond of tickets, is that the parent will be able to waive the ticket if they meet with one of the volunteers a reasonable number of times to try to formulate a game plan to keep better watch over their children and stay more involved with their child’s whereabouts. The job of the volunteer is to hold these parents accountable in their ‘game plan.’”
Looking for Another Tool
Police Lt. Ray Hassett, the law around that part of town, endorsed Chen’s proposal. Parents alone won’t solve the problem in Dwight-Kensington, Hassett argued.
“We tried in vain this past summer to get a lot of parents involved,” he said. “We couldn’t seem to sustain any kind of commitment. Greg Smith is doing a great job. But he’s out there by himself.”
Also, argued Hassett (pictured in file photo), tickets and fines work. Ticketing kids who violated bicycle laws cut down on problems last summer, he said.
“The law may need to be reworked,” he said. “The spirit is clear. We need some help. Police can’t be the parents, as we learned last summer and autumn. We’re certainly social workers of last resort and sometimes surrogate parents. But not at that volume.”
A Band-Aid?
Chen’s predecessors, including the late Dixwell Alderman Stanley Rogers, tried to pass a new curfew law a couple of times in the 1990s. They failed to persuade their colleagues. Police chiefs testified against the idea, saying that they had the legal tools they needed to address disturbances by groups of kids out at night. They also argued that the proposal deprived kids of the right to assemble. Youth advocates pointed out that sometimes kids go outside at night because they feel unsafe inside their own homes.
Asked this week about Chen’s proposal, Roger Vann, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut, attacked it as a “band-aid.”
For starters, he said, the proposal’s unconstitutional. It’s also bad policy, he argued.
“Come on. What’s this, day care?” he said.
“We opposed juvenile curfews and these kinds of restrictions as unjustifiable government intrusion on the rights of young people and the rights of parents to direct the movements of their children,” Vann said. “And under no circumstances should parents be penalized when children violate a curfew” unless the parents have specifically ordered a child to defy the law.Furthermore, Vann argued, curfews are ineffective substitutes for the real solutions: parent organizing and financial support for youth programs.
“What is breaking down is support for young families and young people,” he said. “You can’t legislate that away. More attention needs to be paid to our kids. Keeping them under lock and key at certain times of night is not the answer. This is just a band-aid solution, a lazy way of getting at a complicated problem.”
Chen agreed that organizing parents is the root of any long-term solution. But she argued that organizers need a stick as well as a carrot, in the form of fines.
“Unfortunately the only way we’re seeing now to get parents involved is through ways like this,” she said. “Sometimes parents don’t get involved unless they have to.” A lack of parent accountability in Dwight “is at the root of why we’re having these problems,” she said.
Neighborhood kids waiting for their school buses at the corner of Kensington Street and Edgewood Avenue the other morning offered differing opinions of Chen’s proposal.
“No!” declared Jordan, who’s 12 (and declined to give his last name.). Why not? “Because we got friends that stay out late. We like to stay with our friends. I’ll be sitting on my porch.”
“I think it’s OK. They should do it. It’s not a good neighborhood to be hanging around so late,” said Riverside Education Academy High School senior Enrique Otero (pictured at the top of the story).
“If you want to hang around, you can’t. You’ve got people shooting,” Otero said. He said he hears gunshots a couple of times a week living on Kensington. He makes a point of being inside by 10 p.m. “It’s scary. I got to go across the street to go to my girlfriend’s house. I know bullets don’t have names. But I don’t have a problem with anybody.”
Ultimately, Otero said, cops can’t solve the problem. The neighborhood needs to solve it, including the people doing the shooting. “It’s up to them. If they want to make it a positive neighborhood, they can.”
Otero said he plans to become a cop one day.
“You told me you wanna be a baseball player!” interjected a 9 year-old boy standing alongside him at the bus stop.
“I know,” Otero said. “But you can’t study to be a baseball player.”