Mayor Muriel Bowser wants a longer youth curfew for the District of Columbia, citing recent incidents involving rowdy young people across the city.
In a release, the mayor’s office said legislation would move the curfew start time ahead to 11 p.m. for each day of July and August this year, would apply the curfew to 17-year-olds, would authorize the chief of the Metropolitan Police Department to establish “extended juvenile curfew” zones and would let the mayor authorize emergency juvenile curfews.
A vote on the legislation is scheduled for July 1.
Ms. Bowser said that “we continue to see troubling trends in how groups of young people are gathering in the community — in ways that too often lead to violence and other unlawful behaviors. And when we see patterns of unsafe or unlawful behavior that put young people and the community at risk, we have to act.”
In addition to the MPD chief, Pamela Smith, implementing an extended curfew zone, Advisory Neighborhood Commissions, Main Street organizations and business improvement districts could ask her to create such a zone in their area.
In these zones, curfew would begin at 7 p.m. each night for 15 straight days with a possible extension to 30 days, the mayor’s office said.
The proposed changes were spurred by “incidents of large groups of juveniles engaging in harmful and oftentimes criminal conduct in multiple areas around the city, including the Wharf, Navy Yard, Dupont Circle and U Street,” the mayor’s office said.
Currently, the city’s youth curfew applies only to those under age 17 and goes from 12:01 a.m. to 6 a.m. seven days a week during July and August.
From September through June, curfew starts at 11 p.m. of a given night and ends at 6 a.m. the next day from Sunday evening through Friday morning, then runs from 12:01 a.m. until 6 a.m. Saturday and Sunday mornings.
