Curfew Advocates Say It’s Passed Test of Time

It all began a year ago when an alliance of police chiefs, school administrators and prosecutors set out to convince all 31 cities in the county that a daytime curfew for youths during school hours would reduce crime and prevent young criminals from growing into adult offenders.

A movement against the curfews composed primarily of home-schooling advocates and civil libertarians insisted that this was the first step toward a totalitarian state. In city council chambers across the county, many envisioned police harassing children merely for being on the street.

In the final count, the curfew opponents beat the proposed ordinance back in all but three cities. Police and the district attorney’s office were successful in Buena Park, La Habra and Seal Beach, all of which scheduled some sort of year-end review.

Under the ordinance, truants are issued citations that start at $100 for the first offense and run up to $500 for the third and beyond. But offenders can avoid paying the fine if they go to mediation, where experts arrange for community service or have parents in to discuss family problems.

Tonight, the forces on both sides will meet again in Buena Park, which included a “sunset” provision for the local law to expire Nov. 8. Last month, on a 3-2 vote, the City Council voted to enact the curfew law permanently, but the ordinance needs a second reading tonight before becoming effective.

This time around, law enforcement has some ammunition--statistics that back up its point. Juvenile crime and juvenile arrests during daytime hours dropped sharply, and police are stopping those kids who are most at risk for real trouble, police said.

“We are not dealing with people who are attending school regularly and this is a one-time incident,” Buena Park Police Chief Richard M. Tefank said. “Truancy is a gateway crime leading to serious criminal activity. This is a preventive strategy, and the bottom line is that the data shows it works.”

*

He cited a drop in daytime crime of 28% and an 8% reduction in juvenile arrests as proof that the law works. La Habra police said the city’s daytime burglary rate has dropped by 75%.

And while the police departments agree that no one can clearly link the curfew and crime reduction, they insist that the new law was a significant factor.

Civil libertarians in Orange County and around the nation are not swayed by the figures. As far as they are concerned, the law is a constitutional outrage.

Robyn Nordell, a Fullerton resident who runs a home-schooling program, said she has devoted more than 1,500 unpaid hours to the anti-curfew cause. She helped form a coalition called Citizens for Responsible and Constitutional Laws to fight it and now gets calls for advice from as far away as Alaska.

“To me, it was so appalling,” she said. “The idea that we could have a whole generation of kids who think that it is normal to be stopped in public and have to prove they were doing nothing wrong is very offensive to a free society. It’s dangerous.”

This presumption of innocence is routinely violated in curfews, Nordell said.

“Most of us do believe in tough penalties for true criminals,” she added. “But this makes everybody suspect.”

Her group has been heartened by events in other nearby communities. Four families in Monrovia whose children had been cited for violating the law are challenging that city’s curfew. In Hesperia, residents this month overturned a curfew by referendum. And last January, the Orange County Board of Education unanimously passed a resolution condemning the laws.

Besides being unconstitutional, the daytime curfew is just not practical with so many schools on year-round schedules, the resolution said.

“I am very supportive of law enforcement,” said Kenneth L. Williams, a county Board of Education member. “But there has to be a balance here. Do we want a police state in our nation? That’s what it gets down to. We have to be very careful of our liberties.”

*

Another argument against the curfews, and the basis of the lawsuit against Monrovia, is that the local laws are “preempted” by existing state laws on truancy.

Police said that the local laws do not conflict with the state’s.

“We can stop a person of school-age appearance today with or without a daytime curfew ordinance,” Buena Park’s Tefank said. But police and prosecutors repeatedly cite the lack of state penalties that can be enforced.

And law enforcers in all three cities said that none of the scenarios drawn by the anti-curfew advocates have come true.

“Last year, we wrote a total of 84 daytime curfew citations and we only had three repeats,” said Lt. Joe Milazzo of the La Habra Police Department. “It’s like anything else--whenever change goes into effect, there are a lot of people against it. Then they get used to it and they see that it works.”

The debate had fizzled in La Habra to the point that the ordinance was renewed permanently on a unanimous vote with no debate last month.

Police in Seal Beach, whose City Council also renewed the ordinance last month to make it permanent, issued only three citations during the year and have met with little resistance to the law.

But Tefank, who has a split council on the issue, is ready again to try to quell worries about abuse.

“Give credit to the law enforcement agencies,” he said. “Do not make up falsehoods and defame people who do their job day in and day out with honor and dignity.”

Curfew opponents, he added, “do not understand that our overall goal with this ordinance is to encourage kids who might be inclined not to go to school to go to school.”