They Hate Us for Our Freedoms

In San Diego, it’s illegal for anyone under the age of 18 to be out past 10pm. [...] The city runs ["curfew sweep"] details roughly once a month in each of its nine districts, sometimes arresting dozens of kids a night.

[...]

Conceived as a crime-reduction tactic, curfews were promoted during the “tough on crime” era of the 1990s. In 1996, President Bill Clinton flew out to Monrovia, California – among the first cities to claim curfew success – to publicly endorse the idea at the local high school. From there, they spread like wildfire and remain in place decades later.

From Baltimore, which has one of the strictest curfews in the country, to Denver, where curfew enforcement ramps up every summer, the laws are on the books in hundreds of cities across the US. According to available FBI data, there were 2.6m curfew arrests from 1994 and 2012; that’s an average of roughly 139,000 annually.

  Guardian

Another fine Clinton innovation.

An American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) case study of Minneapolis found the city’s curfew to be racially biased.

Oh, what a surprise.

[W]ith 56% of curfew charges coming against black youth compared with 17% for their white counterparts, despite the city being majority white [ACLU researcher Mike Males] says that he’s found a similar pattern nationally. “They’re always racially discriminatory,” he said. “We have not found a single exception to that.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.