Youth Curfew Is No Answer

On Monday night, the Newport Beach City Council will be considering changes in its 36-year-old juvenile curfew ordinance. The council’s goal is to try to bring its law into “constitutional” conformity so that police can clear out the crowds of teen-agers hanging around on city streets.

Some critics of the curfew law that prohibits minors from loitering in public between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. don’t think the council will be able to enforce it because of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions. Newport Beach probably can draw a curfew statute that will pass legal muster. As a practical matter, it shouldn’t.

We don’t think that teen-agers hanging out together on the street is cause enough for police crackdowns and curfews. If some youths are causing problems and getting into mischief, there are enough laws on the books to handle those few young troublemakers without punishing all teen-agers by requiring them to be off the street by 10 each night.

A far better approach would be to put enough police on patrol in the trouble spots to discourage juvenile high jinks. And if additional laws are needed for specific situations that threaten public safety but aren’t fully covered, the City Council could concentrate on those particular problems.

Enforcement of curfew laws has been uneven. Few cities, however, have taken the aggressive approach seen recently in Newport Beach and the Westwood area of Los Angeles, which raises contradictions and resentment because youths in one neighborhood are subject to police action while those in another are left alone.

The real issue in Newport Beach and many other communities is not so much that the teen-agers meet and loiter in the street, but why they do. The reason is simply that many have no better place to go to meet and have fun. But they should. That’s the problem that needs action.

Newport Beach Councilwoman Jackie Heather has recognized that, by acknowledging that as far as teen-agers in her city are concerned, “ . . . there isn’t anything for them to do that is both legal and fun.” She also admits the curfew approach is “superficial” because it doesn’t give youths something better to do. But Heather still supports a teen-age curfew. Maybe that’s because her efforts to encourage church and civic groups to organize activities for teen-agers have met with such cool response.

The basic problem in Newport Beach is not loitering teen-agers, but the adults who offer them no real alternative to the streets, and the City Council that now appears ready to say they can’t gather there, either.