Revised Procedures Include Court Visits, Parenting Workshops

Enforcing the Los Angeles curfew ordinance has long been frustrating for police officers. An overburdened juvenile justice system, facing far more serious cases, has rarely imposed fines, and the paperwork required to file the charges has caused officers to regard them as a waste of time.

But that is about to change.

Beginning next month, Los Angeles police officers will write citations for curfew violations that will be handled through the juvenile traffic court. A minor receiving a citation, along with a parent, must appear before a court referee. The youth could be fined as much as $50, and the parent could be ordered to attend a parenting workshop run by the city attorney’s office.

A change in state law last year allowed the more convenient process to go into effect, and some police departments have since been issuing the citations.

“But our department was rather slow in deciding how they wanted to put this into effect,” Detective Dallas Binger of the Juvenile Division said.

Binger said parenting classes could be the most important part of the program.

“I firmly believe that most of these kids are running amok because of poor parenting, or no parenting,” he said.

Detective Ben Gonzalez said a curfew is a useful tool in dealing with gangs, and it is used extensively by the LAPD’s anti-gang CRASH units.

“We started using it about four years ago when the gang thing really broke out,” Gonzalez said. “We told our units to aggressively pursue curfew violators in an effort to take teen-agers off the street during those critical hours when gang shootings are taking place.”

Los Angeles’ curfew citation program is based on a similar experiment in San Diego, Gonzalez said.

“We figured if we’re going to be in the curfew enforcement business, we would follow the lead of San Diego, which had a better system than we did,” he said.