A Minor Annoyance : Santa Clarita May Impose a Curfew to Curb a Persistent Problem of Loitering Youths

It’s Friday night in Santa Clarita and sheriff’s deputies are responding to yet another J-415 call, radio code for “juveniles disturbing the peace.” They roll up to an overly familiar scene: 30 to 40 teen-agers drinking and playing loud music outside a suburban tract house, no parents in sight.

The deputies break up the party but get called shortly afterward to another house.

Same kids. New party.

And the process gets repeated.

Deputies get an average of four calls an hour like these on Friday and Saturday nights, prompting the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to ask the Santa Clarita City Council to enact a curfew prohibiting minors from loitering between 10 p.m. and sunrise. Deputies say they need the curfew--which the council will vote on March 13--to deal with large groups of teen-agers who congregate in parking lots, cruise the streets or descend on normally tranquil neighborhoods for parties.

To no one’s surprise, the proposed curfew has not been warmly embraced by the youths who respond with the traditional lament of suburban teen-agers: “There’s nothing to do around here.”

“There’s not a lot going on before 10 o’clock,” Theresa Valdez, 16, said while standing in a McDonald’s parking lot with a group of her friends who had been rousted from a party by deputies earlier in the evening. “Things just barely get started at 10 o’clock.”

Youths use the parking lot as a gathering point so they can coordinate plans for the night, James Cawthern, 18, said. “And usually the police will show up here, and we’ll go to a party, and they’ll follow us there.”

Without the curfew, deputies say they are at a disadvantage in dealing with a large group of unruly teen-agers. They have to ask the group to disperse because they can’t threaten them with arrest.

“We’re kind of just asking them to do it because we’re asking them to cooperate with us,” Lt. Marvin Dixon said.

“What is unfortunate is that they don’t have a tool available to them if they just see a group of kids gathered,” he said.

Dixon said much of the deputies’ time on weekend nights, and almost every night during the summer, is taken up with chasing groups of teen-agers from one place to another.

“It’s not infrequent when we respond that we’ll tell them they need to wrap it up and find something else to do, and they’ll move to a different location. We have had instances where they move the same group four times.”

A major concern for authorities is alcohol consumption. Although in the majority of calls that deputies respond to they take no action beyond breaking up an unruly group or simply asking them to turn down their music, teen-age drinking is a different matter.

“We are going to arrest or detain any juvenile who has alcohol,” said Sgt. Wallace Fullerton, the night watch sergeant. “We think their parents need to know about that.”

An additional concern is gang activity. Officials hold that most gang activity in Santa Clarita stems from members who come into the area from outside. But there is increasing concern that gangs may spread from Los Angeles or that local gangs will develop.

“We’re not trying to penalize anyone unnecessarily,” Councilwoman Jo Anne Darcy said. “We’re just trying to keep a lid on things so we can avoid a problem of gangs in the future.”

Deputies stress that if the curfew is approved, it will be used as a tool to help them deal with minors they regard as unruly, not to harass the average teen-ager out on a date or going to the movies with friends.

“It doesn’t mean that tomorrow 500 kids are going to be sitting at the sheriff’s station waiting for mom and dad to pick them up,” Fullerton said. “It’s just not going to happen.”

That’s precisely the problem with curfew laws, according to some civil rights activists.

“They are a setup for selective discriminatory enforcement,” said Joan Howarth, a professor at Golden Gate University Law School in San Francisco who studied curfews when she worked at the Southern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

“The reality is that very few curfew ordinances are routinely enforced. But they’re used by police officers against certain kinds of teen-agers,” such as those who are perceived to be in the wrong place or associating with the wrong group, she said.

“It’s coming very close to creating a status crime,” she said, meaning that teen-agers could be detained for who they are rather than for what they’ve done.

Part of the problem, city officials say, is that there is little for teen-agers to do in Santa Clarita. The city has undergone an explosion of housing development in the past 10 years, but there are still few recreational facilities, other than a 10-screen movie theater and a bowling alley.

“That’s about it, unless the kids go down” to the San Fernando Valley, said Cecilia Foley, recreation superintendent for the city of Santa Clarita.

Additional facilities and programs will open soon or are in the planning stages, including a roller-skating rink that will open next month. And construction will begin on a Santa Clarita Valley Boys and Girls Club facility in Newhall Park this fall.

But deputies said additional facilities will not address the basic problems they face every weekend night. The youths who will use those facilities are not the ones who get into trouble, Fullerton said.

Santa Clarita is one of the few local cities without a curfew. The city and county of Los Angeles have curfew laws, as do Glendale, Burbank, Simi Valley, Palmdale and Lancaster. Police departments in those jurisdictions say the curfew ordinances are not routinely enforced, but are used when they want to crack down on a particular enforcement problem or conduct a sweep of a particular area.

For example, the Los Angeles Police Department used an 89-year-old curfew law in 1985 to control partying youths in Westwood and to combat gang violence in South Los Angeles three years ago.

Sheriff’s deputies in the Antelope Valley said they will use the Lancaster curfew law to help break up a large group of youths who regularly gather in a shopping center parking lot. In December, a Municipal Court judge struck down Lancaster’s ordinance against loitering, which deputies had used to detain some members of the group who were over 18.

“And when we get back to cracking down again,” curfew laws are “what we’ll use because that’s all we have now,” Deputy Mike Kuper said.

The Sheriff’s Department enforced a curfew law until the city of Santa Clarita was incorporated on Dec. 15, 1987. During the incorporation period, while the city was using the Los Angeles County Code until it could develop its own municipal code, a state appellate court declared the Long Beach city curfew law unconstitutional because it did not provide for legitimate exceptions for a minor to be out after 10 p.m.

Because the curfew for Los Angeles County was similar to the Long Beach ordinance, the county counsel rewrote it. Most other cities also rewrote their ordinances at this time, and the language of these new curfew laws is almost identical. The Board of Supervisors adopted the new code in December, 1988, but the city of Santa Clarita opted not to enact it, at least partly because of concern over the tactics used by sheriff’s deputies in dealing with local teen-agers.

In September, 1987, deputies breaking up a Valencia party got into a melee with participants. Party-goers and their parents complained to the Sheriff’s Department and later to the City Council, and the furor prompted the council to defer enacting a curfew.

Dixon said many parents at that time believed that “the last thing we needed was another tool for law enforcement to use against the teen-agers of the valley.”

Councilwoman Jan Heidt said many deputies came to the Santa Clarita Valley from more urban stations where the crime rate was higher, and consequently they took a harder line when responding to calls than was necessary in the suburbs.

“I don’t think the climate was exactly right until we saw the sheriff’s station had settled down,” she said. “Since then, the sheriff’s station has really tried to work with the kids,” including sponsoring dances at Magic Mountain and stationing deputies at local high schools.

Both the Sheriff’s Department and the City Council are actively seeking the input of high school students before the council’s vote March 13. Dixon met with high school students on the local youth council, who will debate the issue in the council chambers March 12 as part of a Youth in Government day.

Meanwhile, deputies say the curfew will not be overly restrictive and will allow minors, for example, to go to a late movie as long as they don’t loiter in parking lots afterward.

“I can remember when I was a teen-ager, and somebody says ‘curfew,’ and I think I can’t be out after 10 p.m., and that’s not the case,” Dixon said. “And if that’s what they think it is, I would be opposed to it if I were a teen-ager.”

CURFEW PROVISIONS

The basic content and wording of all local curfew laws, including those in the cities of Los Angeles, Burbank, Glendale and Simi Valley, is similar to the Los Angeles County ordinance that the city of Santa Clarita is considering:

“It is unlawful for any minor under the age of 18 years to loiter, idle, wander, stroll or aimlessly drive or ride about in or upon any public street, avenue, highway, road, curb area, alley, park, playground or other public ground, public place or public building, vacant lot or unsupervised place between the hours of 10 p.m. on any day and sunrise of the immediately following day.”

The laws then provide for most or all of the following exceptions:

* If accompanied by a parent or guardian, or other adult having the legal care or custody of the minor, or by a spouse 18 years of age or older.

* Those running an errand for a parent or legal guardian or other adult.

* If returning directly home from a public meeting, or place of public entertainment, such as a movie, play, sporting event, dance or school activity.

* If engaged in a lawful business, trade, profession or occupation.