An by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to set an 11 p.m. nightly curfew for kids 17 and younger and allowed police to create juvenile curfew zones to discourage large gatherings expires Friday, just before midnight.
On May 5, a plan to create a permanent youth curfew in the nation’s capital is scheduled for a second and final vote by the D.C. Council.
Ahead of that vote, young people in the city are speaking out.
At held by the council’s Committee on Youth Affairs, young people discussed possible alternatives to youth curfews.
“In this city, instead of investing in us, you criminalize us, you see groups of young people and assume the worst. You treat us like the problem to be managed, instead of people to be supported,” Naveah Williams, an Anacostia High School student, testified.
Onesti Hill, a gun violence prevention specialist with said a problem she’s seen arise often is adults allowing two bad apples to spoil the bunch.
“There’s been countless times where I’ve been to an event, and just because two people were fighting, now the whole event is shut down and everyone is just roaming the streets, lurking, doing nothing, because y’all shut down the hangout,” Hill said.
Darion Carter, with the Trigger Project, spoke of a lack of places to go.
“There’s not enough safe spaces in the city for youth to have fun,” he said.
Others, like, the senior class president at Thurgood Marshall Academy, agreed. He said a good model is the in Southeast: “We get fed, we can relax, we can play. … And we receive Uber vouchers to get there and back home safely.”
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