No kid likes to be told that it’s bedtime, but when kids become teenagers, police might be the ones enforcing the rules. In Charlottesville, more kids have been getting picked up lately under the city’s juvenile curfew law—partly because of increased patrolling and enforcement in response to a rash of recent Downtown assaults. The law says that if kids are 16 or under, they can’t be out in public after midnight during the week or after 1am on weekends. City spokesman Ric Barrick tells us that the number of kids getting stopped has "probably doubled over the past six months," to 23 warnings and 22 arrests in that period. What’s more, businesses can be held responsible for serving minors after the curfew hour has arrived.
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Enforcement aside, an unscientific survey of actual teenagers walking around Downtown (legally—it was a very respectable 4pm) indicated that there’s a vague understanding at best of what the laws actually are. Corey Fanning and Alexandra Kessler, two 16-year-olds approached on the Mall, guessed that 11pm was the magic hour; they themselves usually go home by 11:30, they said. Neither girl is a fan of the curfew law. "We’re mature enough to be able to stay out on weekends," Kessler opined—"as long as we don’t drink and drive." She did concede that the law is "safe."
Over in Lee Park, three of her male counterparts were even less informed. "I didn’t know we had one," Jake Phipps, 16, said about the curfew. His friend Ryan Grant, also 16, knew there was a law but not what time he had to be home to stay legal. "If it’s your parents telling you, that’s one thing," Phipps said; the idea of cops forcibly ending an evening out sat less comfortably. What’s fair for cops to do when they spot a minor out past curfew, I asked? "They should drive that person home," said Phipps. This earned him a knowing high-five from 17-year-old Alex Chappell, who himself was driven home by police just a couple of weeks ago. He’d been out walking with another friend on Wertland Street at about 1:30am. The cop wasn’t too tough on them ("He just said it was dangerous [to be out]," Chappell reports), perhaps because, as a 17-year-old, Chappell is actually not a minor by the definition of the curfew ordinance.
A group of five African-American girls who were waiting to catch a bus came closest to naming the correct curfew hour, arguing amongst themselves about whether it was midnight or 1am. The girls, ages 12 to 14, finished up dishes of ice cream and danced around each other on the sidewalk as they talked about the curfew. "I don’t like it," one said; another complained that it "interrupts my party time." Generally, they get home by midnight, they said—though one girl, 14-year-old Tasha Johnson, had a couple of stories about a 16-year-old brother who’d been given a warning on one occasion and "taken Downtown" in handcuffs on another.
Suburban kids enjoy a little more leniency, at least in terms of official notions about their safety: Albemarle County’s law allows minors to be out until 1am every day of the week and says they must be in a vehicle for police to be able to stop them under the curfew ordinance. (If they’re walking, other laws could apply.) According to County police Lieutenant John Teixeira, only three such arrests have been made over the past six months.
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