At Thursday night’s meeting of the Baltimore City Council, there was really only one subject on the agenda. With the start of the new school year fast approaching, city officials were admirably seeking ways to address violence in the schools and chronic absenteeism among many students. Absentee rates in most of the schools have risen by more than 20 percent since the beginning of the pandemic and they have not gone back down. One council member reported that 85% of the youth homicide victims from 2016 to 2020 were chronically absent. Far too many teenagers are seen wandering around in the streets well past midnight, so there is little chance that they will be getting up and heading to class in the morning. And if they do show up, the odds of the “resource officers” who replaced the police in the schools being able to stop outbreaks of violence are quite low. With all that in mind, another member of the council raised the prospect of implementing a curfew for children under the age of 18, but questions of how such a thing could be implemented and enforced were immediately raised, along with issues of whether or not such a policy could be effective. (CBS Baltimore)
City Councilman Robert Stokes broached the idea of a curfew for teens 17 years old and younger.
“Our young people that’s out in the street, 2 o’clock 3 o’clock in the morning, and at 17 years old, and then they’re not going to school,” he said.
A youth curfew was tried back in 2014, when children were picked up and taken to recreation and city centers. Another was implemented in the summer of 2018, when children were picked up and taken home.
Let’s give the City Council credit for at least trying to do something about Baltimore’s chronically failing public school system. But the objecting officials at that meeting were bringing up a number of valid points that would need to be considered before rushing into something like this.
First of all, as noted in the CBS report, curfews have been attempted before in Baltimore and they didn’t go well. When they implemented a curfew in 2014, the ACLU immediately protested the move because it was somehow seen as being racist. In 2018 they attempted a plan where the police would pick up youths on the streets after dark and take them home, but so many teenagers simply ignored the rule that it was almost totally ineffective and the policy was soon forgotten.
As usual, the City Council seemed to be dancing around the real problem in an attempt to avoid talking about the actual issue. When it comes to violence in the schools and teens roaming the streets at night and getting into trouble, most of the problem is being driven by Baltimore’s gangs. They recruit children at a very young age, knowing that they won’t do any serious jail time until they turn 18 and many of them will remain on the streets even after reaching adulthood. The students who come from families with responsible parents who steer their kids away from gang life and emphasize the value of an education probably aren’t letting their kids roam around at all hours of the night or skip school.
And do we really think that young, aspiring gangbangers are going to be put off by the idea of a curfew? ‘Oh, man, I was going to go stick up Benny’s crack house tonight, but we’re not allowed out after dark.’
Given the number of gang members running many of the neighborhoods in the less affluent parts of Charm City as compared to the number of cops patrolling the streets on any given night, how many will the police actually be able to pick up? And as some of the members of the City Council pointed out, where will they take them if they do manage to get them into a squad car? The Council was already insisting that they couldn’t be taken to jail or any form of incarceration. How many of the truants will wind up being armed and decide to shoot it out with the law rather than being taken in?
While they may hate to hear this, perhaps the best thing Baltimore could do is put cops back in the schools in force and do so immediately. Let them keep the peace and protect the students whose families actually want to provide them with an education and a professional future. If they want to truly put an end to the majority of the gang violence and restore order to the streets, they need to find a way to spur a cultural change across Baltimore where people stand up and refuse to tolerate or feed into the gang culture. Thin the ranks of the gangs in that fashion and the problem will largely solve itself, even though there will always be some residual criminal activity.
