By the start of the next school year, Baltimore city will have tightened its existing curfew law.
The City Council passed the bill early last week. It will go into effect 60 days after Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake signs it. The law was amended once before, in 1994, and its origin in Baltimore dates back to 1978.
Here’s the timeline:
1978 - Baltimore’s curfew law goes into effect. As JoAnnaDaemmrichwrote in the Baltimore Sun in 1994, “the city created a curfew to try to ensure that children completed their homework and get enough rest for school.”
1994 - A spike in crimes and shootings with youth victims prompts City Council to unanimously approve a change. Teenagers under 17 now had to be inside after 11 p.m. during the week, midnight on weekends. According to Daemmrich, then-City Councilman Martin O’Malley was a strong advocate for the proposal. Speaking to his colleagues, he said, “’We're saying it's criminal to let our kids hang out late at night, especially when you consider some of the carnage on some of these street corners.’”
Here are some of the statistics O’Malley was referring to, reported by Daemmrich:
2014 - The City Council approves a new bill, making the curfew law even more stringent. Last week on WYPR’s Maryland Morning, Councilman Brandon Scott said:
This has never for me been about public safety. This is about old school common sense and changing what I think is an outdated law to making it have more common sense and fit the goals that we want our young people to do with their lives.
As Yvonne Wegner and Danae King reported for the Sun, Rawlings-Blake believes the new proposition “is about taking them out of harm’s way.” She said that she is “not willing to gamble the lives of our children.” The number of youth homicides in Baltimore is already up from this time last year.