City Curfew Laws: Pros And Cons

City curfews have many advantages and disadvantages. Popular british newspaper, The Guardian published an article about curfews. They talked of an incident where three teenageres were searched, handcuffed, and put in the back of police cars for a ride to the command post. These young adults were not picked up for using drugs nor drinking. Instead, as it turns out, it is illegal in San Diego for anyone under the age of 18 to be out past 10 p.m., therefore, their crime was being out past curfew. Curfews are laws that prohibit or limit the right to be out in public at certain times, or in some cases, require businesses to close their doors during declarable hours. There are three major types of curfew laws: juvenile, emergency, and business curfew

Many cities have implemented curfews to protect children from the dangers posed on city streets at night and to prevent young people from the trouble they might create for themselves while out unsupervised or from being targeted by others, who would want to do them wrong. Juvenile curfew laws prohibit people, usually under the age of 18, from being in public after certain hours. With this curfew, parents do not worry as much about their children. It helps them to know, that the kid is safe and home. To prevent worrying about their children, many parents also set earlier curfews of their own, if they feel their kids should be home even earlier than dictated by the government. In addition, it can be dangerous to be out when it is dark, and not only because the child can do something bad or wrong, but because there can be people with horrifying intentions towards weaker and younger individuals. Of course, dangerous situations can be faced everywhere and anytime, even in daylight, but juvenile curfew can at least try to prevent these sorts of things from happening during night

Teenagers will probably have a higher possibility of going against their parents word. Also, the curfew can possibly give a teenager temptation to break it. To put it another way: when parents tell their kids that they cannot go out after 10.00 p.m., teenagers may take it as a game and most of them, at some point, will challenge their parents restrictions, because it is in every teenager to do the opposite of what people tell them to do. But the important thing about temptation to break curfew is that most of the young adults that sneak out would not do bad things, they just want to see if they get caught. As well as that, maybe they have an important problem to deal with, which means they might have to go out. In 1997 a city survey was done by The United States conference of Mayors. They found that 276 of 347 responding cities had a night curfew. Seventy-six had a day curfew as well. The officers said that it frees up their time during curfew hours to do other police work. Consequently, kids do not go out because they know they will get in trouble. This response shows that the cities think that kids would stay at home because otherwise they will get in trouble, but actually, it is creating a temptation to sneak out. Accordingly, this may be the reason for teenagers to commit crime. Mayor Jerry Abramson of Louisville, chairman of the Mayors conference task force on youth violence, said the survey showed