Police Commission OKs New Curfew Crackdown

Struggling with the vexing issue of how to protect children without punishing them, the Los Angeles Police Commission on Tuesday conditionally approved a curfew enforcement program for five city police areas and set out to implement the plan next month.

The new plan does not change city curfew laws--which make it illegal for people under age 18 to be loitering after 10 p.m.--but it directs police captains to develop enforcement plans for their areas and to target their efforts at neighborhoods rife with narcotics or gang activity. It also calls for monitoring of the curfew enforcement efforts to ensure that young people arrested for curfew violations are not being singled out because of their race.

“We are trying to avoid having more children become victims of crime,” said Commissioner Edith R. Perez, who spearheaded the effort with backing from Mayor Richard Riordan and others. “This is not meant to be punitive at all.”

Enforcement, she added, will be limited to dangerous areas in each of the five police divisions involved. “We are not targeting youth who are going to the movies, who are going to the grocery store,” she said.

Perez and other officials highlighted the example of the LAPD’s Hollenbeck area, where community and Police Department representatives jointly developed an enforcement program under which juveniles out late at night can be cited and brought to the East Los Angeles station. Once they are there, their parents are called and directed to pick them up.

At Hollenbeck, the youngsters and their parents are referred to counseling programs. So far, 76 minors have been cited and 71 have completed a counseling program. Of the five who dropped out of the program, police said, three have been killed in gang-related incidents.

“These 71 kids, when presented with positive behavior, chose positive behavior,” said Capt. Bruce Hagerty, the commanding officer in Hollenbeck and a leader whose community policing efforts have won wide praise, particularly in the aftermath of a police shooting in Lincoln Heights last year.

Commissioners unanimously approved the creation of a pilot program for the Hollenbeck, Hollywood, Southeast, Foothill and Devonshire divisions--five areas intentionally chosen to reflect the city’s geographic and ethnic diversity and to avoid a situation in which young people cited for curfew violations are disproportionately black or Latino.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which traditionally has fought curfew laws, is tentatively supporting this effort but is asking police officials to monitor its progress to guard against racially disparate arrests. If all goes as planned, the city will launch the program next month.

ACLU spokesman Allan Parachini attended Tuesday’s commission meeting and noted that the ACLU has been conferring with Perez and others about the proposal since last year. In letters to Perez and City Councilwoman Laura Chick, who chairs the Public Safety Committee, Parachini expressed guarded support for the curfew proposal but spelled out a number of areas that the ACLU would like to see addressed.

In particular, Parachini suggested that the LAPD aggressively inform residents about the program and the possibility that people under 18 might be arrested if they are loitering after 10 p.m. Commissioners echoed that suggestion and said fliers and other announcements are being prepared.

In addition, Hagerty said that churches and schools in Hollenbeck have been asked to help spread the word in that area, and that each high school has been asked to name five students who can report back to that area’s Community Police Advisory Board with updates of how the program is being received by young people.

ACLU leaders also have suggested that the LAPD develop a special order laying out the grounds for a curfew arrest and have stressed that the program needs to be applied evenly.

“An obvious danger to curfew enforcement is that the ordinance will become a tool by which police will focus enforcement on youth of color or kids whose appearance, including clothing and hair styles, is unconventional,” Parachini wrote to Perez last year. “Any prototype or citywide enforcement program needs to be monitored to ensure that this kind of inappropriate targeting does not occur.”

Commission President Deirdre Hill sounded a similar warning Tuesday, saying she was convinced that the curfew program has “a number of laudable goals” but that she also was concerned that some communities would not welcome it.

“In many communities, particularly those with children of color, this is going to be greeted with great skepticism,” she said.

Police officials acknowledged that some residents would be skeptical, but they stressed that monitoring the program would attempt to remove doubts.

“This issue is of particular concern to me as a mother of two children and as a daughter of two senior citizens who speak Spanish only,” Perez said. “That is very strongly in the front of my mind.”