To Many, Curfew Project Serves as a Wake-Up Call

The streets of Boyle Heights are unusually quiet as midnight passes--the time when parties break up and gunfire breaks out.

The cops are on the streets again on weekend curfew patrol. They’ve nabbed dozens of under-18 teenagers and summoned parents to the Hollenbeck station.

But this late-night operation on Los Angeles’ Eastside is more than a bare-knuckled crackdown. Police have been enforcing the curfew for two years, but for many families, it is the beginning of an education about keeping their children safe from violence in the streets.

The rest of the city is waking up to Hollenbeck’s model, which seeks to curb juvenile delinquency by addressing troubles at home.

Last week, the Police Commission ordered the program expanded to five police divisions, from Watts to Northridge. The five areas were chosen with an eye to broad racial, ethnic and class balance. The City Council, meanwhile, is debating whether to launch the operation citywide amid concerns by some members that enforcement in selected areas could trigger civil rights concerns.

The Hollenbeck process starts with a late-night phone call to parents to come get their teenagers. It continues with misdemeanor citations and court appearances and ends with tough-love counseling aimed at ending delinquent behavior.

In lieu of paying fines--the typical punishment for curfew violations--the teenage scofflaws perform community service--removing graffiti, clearing weeds from roadways, even studying to raise their grades.

At the same time, their parents agree to attend classes at local community centers and schools where they learn how to set household rules and make them stick, how to listen to their children’s troubles and how to broach the sensitive subjects of drugs and gang involvement.

“We’re trying to wake up the parents and say, ‘Your kid needs help and you need help,’ ” said Tammy Membreno, executive director of Barrio Action Group, an El Sereno organization that offers counseling and parenting classes.

The Hollenbeck Division has conducted its operation with little fanfare for about two years, enforcing a long-standing law that makes it illegal for anyone under 18 to loiter on public streets in Los Angeles after 10 p.m.

Even as the City Council debates the scope of an expanded operation, Eastside leaders are praising the local curfew effort for quieting neighborhoods accustomed to nightly scuffles and gunfire.

“We’re behind it 100%,” said Benita Orozco, a Lincoln Heights activist and mother of six. “We’re tired of seeing children killed. All of us parents are for it.”

Maria Garcia, whose 14-year-old son was picked up in a curfew sweep about six months ago, is sold on the program.

Garcia says that parenting classes she now attends at the Los Angeles Boys & Girls Club in Lincoln Heights have taught her the importance of discipline.

“I’ve learned how to have rules and consequences in the home,” said Garcia, 33. “Now I don’t allow my son to wear the cholo attire.”

Garcia’s son is performing his community service at the club. Rather than pull weeds or clean graffiti, however, the boy agreed to bring up his failing grades by studying at the facility two hours a day after school. As a result, his marks have risen from Ds and Fs to Bs and Cs.

But teenagers criticize the curfew operation for unfairly targeting them.

“The police pick us up just because of the way we’re dressed,” said a 17-year-old, wearing baggy black pants and an oversized white T-shirt as he was shooed into the Hollenbeck station during a curfew sweep on Saturday morning, more than two hours after curfew. “I was minding my own business.”

A 14-year-old, sitting in the back of a squad car headed for the station, offered his own fatalistic assessment.

“This curfew thing is stupid,” he said. “Everybody’s got their own time to go. If I get shot, it was probably meant to be.”

Experts on juvenile delinquency say the curfew operation can keep “fence-sitters”--gang member wannabes--away from the streets. But such efforts have little effect on the hard-core--youths who have dropped out of school and shun authority, the authorities say.

Indeed, during Friday’s curfew sweep, some of the 40 violators brought to the Hollenbeck station were repeat offenders who chuckled when police asked whether they had fulfilled their community service requirements from their previous curfew violations. For some of these tough kids, curfew is the least of their transgressions.

“These kids are extremely macho,” said Dan Kuhn, program manager of the Delinquency Control Institute, a USC program that teaches police officers and others about juvenile crime. “Their buddies are laughing at them because they got arrested for curfew. It’s almost an insult.”

Counselors say that many parents refuse to acknowledge their children’s involvement in gangs and ignore the violence on the streets around their homes. Still others, particularly single parents, are often too busy working to address trouble with their children.

It was a group of parents, fed up with nighttime loitering by teenagers, who sought a police crackdown about two years ago. Police offered to conduct regular curfew sweeps and asked in return that residents help with time-consuming paperwork. A partnership was born.

Now about 20 volunteers join Hollenbeck police twice a month for the curfew operations. Police nab 40 to 50 teenagers each evening, bringing them back to the station, where volunteers write citations.

The operations often last until 4 a.m. or later, as parents arrive throughout the night to pick up their children.

Police credit the curfew effort with helping to reduce drive-by shootings, homicides and other violence, at least on the nights they conduct the sweeps.

Police also say that the volunteers lend local credibility to the effort. Before parents can leave the station with their teenagers, volunteers spend some time in on-the-spot counseling.

Early Saturday morning, Hector Garcia mustered all the emotion he could as he urged a 17-year-old boy to stop hanging out on the streets.

“A bullet can hit anybody,” Garcia told the youth and his father. “Stay out of the streets. Stay home. You have plenty of time to grow up. The parties will still be there.”

The boy seemed uninterested. He looked down at his feet during most of the 10-minute talk.

But his father, Danny Armenta, still wearing bedroom slippers and looking haggard after driving the 20 miles here from Pacoima not long after midnight, listened closely.

Armenta said he would willingly take a parenting class. After all, he has five younger daughters to think about, not to mention his son.

“I call this being helped,” said the bleary-eyed Armenta. “I recently had a nephew killed. I am thankful for these people.”