Editorial: Another bad idea to make us ‘safe’

From the people who brought you Big Brother cameras at Harlingen street corners comes another ordinance that sacrifices liberty in the name of security: a teen curfew law.

Harlingen city commissioners agreed Wednesday to make it illegal for youths 16 and younger to be in public after 10:30 p.m. Sundays through Thursdays and after midnight on Fridays and Saturdays.

Mayor Chris Boswell’s reasoning for the new ordinance consisted of “help(ing) police combat graffiti, vandalism and juvenile crime” and that “we’re the only major community left that didn’t have one.”

As to the latter argument, anybody who doesn’t recognize the fallacy of the always-popular everyone-else-is-doing-it argument must not be a parent.

Regarding the first argument, anecdotal evidence is mixed as to whether teen curfews actually help reduce crime. However, the most exhaustive effort to analyze this question leaves no doubt as to the answer: curfews don’t work.

A 1999 study done by Mike A. Males and Dan Macal-lair(http://wcr.sonoma.edu/v1n2/males.html) analyzed crime data throughout California from 1980 through 1997. It concluded, “The consistent result of this analysis is that curfew enforcement (even the strongest) has no effect on crime, youth crime, or youth safety no matter what the time period, jurisdiction, or type of crime measure studied. … Thus, curfews appear to be another ‘panacea’ for crime problems — a simplistic solution that on closer inspection has no demonstrable effect.”

Actual solutions to juvenile crime are, of course, much more complicated and involve justice system reform, school choice, economic opportunity and, above all, parental responsibility, which is all too happily ceded by some parents once a curfew becomes law.

What disturbs us more than the question of whether a curfew will work — or even whether police will bother to enforce it and, if they do, will they do so in an even-handed manner — is the notion that a person’s constitutional rights may be voided if the cause is great enough or that those rights apply only when Americans reach a certain age.

On its face, a curfew is a clear violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of the right to assemble. In a free society, a person shouldn’t have to answer to government authorities simply because they are on the streets late at night. When it comes to minors, they should answer to their parents, not the local police.

One might argue that a curfew might be constitutionally acceptable under certain instances, such as when martial law is declared during an emergency. (We think the term “emergency” applies to something like a natural disaster or wide-scale rioting, to which the current circumstances cannot be compared by any stretch of the imagination.)

But if one does somehow conclude that Harlingen’s graffiti and vandalism “emergency” warrants a curfew, the Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantees that we all receive “equal protection of the laws.” By this standard, the curfew should apply to young and old alike — all of us should have to be off the streets by 10:30 p.m., a totally unacceptable solution in all but the direst emergencies.

Unfortunately, the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868 to secure the rights of former slaves, has not always been scrupulously enforced, as any reader who has been stopped for “driving while Mexican,” “driving while black” or “driving while young” might attest. (For an astute perspective on Harlingen’s curfew, check the following link to the Web site of the National Youth Rights Association — http://forums.youthrights.org/-showthread.php?threadid=13709 — where a “youth rights titan” rewrote the Star’s recent story on the curfew “for a different time,” by substituting the word “black” where “youth” and juvenile” appeared in the original.)

We urge city commissioners to quickly see the error of turning young people into second-class citizens, the Harlingen police into surrogate parents and the U.S. Constitution into just another piece of paper.

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