The Curfew Question

Shopping at the Buena Park Mall can be fun. It can also get you arrested.

If you’re school-age, that is, and are supposed to be in class.

Buena Park is one of three cities in Orange County with a daytime curfew, and after two years of this controversial experiment, the city’s police chief, Richard M. Tefank, has been touting it as a huge success.

Some 350 arrests have been made there. And, with just two exceptions, the students and their parents have agreed to a plan that has put them back in school.

That was Tefank’s goal: “If you keep them in school, they become productive citizens who can get a job. That reduces our city’s crime rate later.”

But Tefank got a bonus he hadn’t necessarily expected. A preliminary study by UC Irvine research professor James Meaker shows that daytime burglaries among juveniles went down in the city.

Meaker’s research, part of a broader study stemming from a grant by the National Institute of Justice, is not yet ready for publication. But Meaker says preliminary findings show a significant drop in Buena Park’s daytime burglaries.

“By all indications, daytime curfew seems to be effective in that city,” Meeker said.

Daytime curfews are now common in large cities, with Los Angeles reporting more than a 20% drop in property crimes since its law went into effect. The idea has been a much tougher sell in Orange County, where many parents argued that such rules are draconian and violated the rights of teens. After much debate, only three cities adopted them: Seal Beach, La Habra and Buena Park.

All three began it about the same time about two years ago, after the Orange County Police Chiefs and Sheriff’s Assn. suggested looking at daytime curfew as one positive way to make cities safer. This came in the wake of President Clinton’s trip to Monrovia, where he praised that city as the first to create daytime curfew for minors.

The Monrovia program, though it reduced truancy, got in trouble with the courts soon after Clinton’s visit. Parents of children attending home schooling filed suit to keep Monrovia police from arresting their children.

One of the plaintiffs, Monrovia parent Rosemary Harrahill, said her two home-schooled sons had been stopped by police 22 times in nine months. Children in home schools attend classes at a variety of hours and might well be on the streets during some day hours. The courts required Monrovia to change its curfew law to avoid such arrests.

Daytime curfew was not an easy passage in Orange County. All three cities got some objections from home-school parents before the city councils there adopted the curfew.

But Tefank says that in the two years of daytime curfew, his office has not received a single complaint from a home-study parent.

Actually, the three cities with daytime curfew all handle situations differently:

* In Buena Park, police do not pick up youngsters they see on the street. They respond only to calls they receive. The majority of those calls (about 60%) come from merchants or security at the Buena Park Mall.

“If you’re not in school, the mall becomes a hangout,” Tefank said. “But we’re not down at Knott’s Berry Farm harassing people.”

Students cited for skipping school are given an option of paying a $125 fine, going to trial or returning to school through a mediation program involving their parents.

The third option is the one almost all of them do, and Tefank says there have been only a handful of repeat offenders.

* In La Habra, the police do pick up young people they see on the street.

“We’re a bedroom community,” La Habra Police Capt. John Rees said. “If we see a teen out during the school day, it’s usually one of ours who should be in school.”

But arrests are discretionary, said Rees, and there have been no arrests of anyone who is part of home schooling.

One big way La Habra differs from Buena Park: Those cited in La Habra are required to return to school and provide 20 hours of community service.

“This may not work in other cities, but it works for us,” Rees said.

* In Seal Beach, daytime curfew is enforced only if a teen gets in trouble and is arrested for another violation. Its few arrests there have been mostly teens from other cities, police say.

Daytime curfew has other dissenters besides parents who teach their children at home.

Mike A. Males of Irvine, an author who specialized in social issues affecting youth, attacked the Monrovia success figures as overblown. In his book “Framing Youth: 10 Myths About the Next Generation,” Males says daytime curfews present ethical problems: “Law enforcement [in Monrovia] was effecting house arrest on youths who had committed no criminal offense.”

Males also complained that lower-income youths were more likely to be stopped because the upper-income youths are in cars.

The issue is an emotional one. Two years ago, numerous city councils voted the curfews down, with the mayor of Villa Park denouncing them as “Hitlerism at its worst.”

And despite several recent national reports showing that daytime curfews reduce crime, there appears little interest in revisiting the issue.

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Young Criminals

While crime has been falling in Orange County, the number of juvenile misdemeanor arrests has been rising. The purpose of the daytime curfew is to reduce property crimes--such as burglaries--committed by teens after school.

Juvenile misdeanor arrests in Orange County.

1989: 8,989

1990: 8,723

1991: 8,638

1992: 9,153

1993: 10,123

1994: 9,873

1995: 10,095

1996: 11,169

1997: 10,570

1998: 11,417

Total crimes per 100,000 residents in Orange County.

1989: 5,924

1990: 6,049

1991: 5,892

1992: 5,612

1993: 5,297

1994: 4,929

1995: 4,602

1996: 3,914

1997: 3,449

1998: 3,017

Buena Park: Juvenile Arrests

1997: 682

1998: 536

Source: California Department of Justice