What to Know
- City Council approved a permanent 10 p.m. curfew for children and teens under the age of 18 in Philadelphia.
- The bill passed by a vote of 15-1 on Thursday.
- Over the summer, the city had enacted a temporary curfew in an attempt to keep children safe amid a surge in gun violence. That policy expired in September. The current bill does not have an end date.
City Council approved a permanent 10 p.m. curfew for children and teens under the age of 18 in Philadelphia.
The bill passed by a vote of 15-1 on Thursday. Over the summer, the city had enacted a temporary curfew in an attempt to keep children safe amid a surge in gun violence. That policy expired in September. The current bill does not have an end date.
The latest legislation now heads to Mayor Jim Kenney’s desk to be signed.
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Under Philadelphia’s previous curfew law, 14 to 17 year olds had to be inside by 10 p.m. while children 13 years of age and younger had a 9:30 p.m. curfew.
Investigators
Digging deeper into stories that affect the Philadelphia region
Between July 7, 2022, and September 19, 2022, Philadelphia police reported 536 curfew violations. During the same time period in 2021, 124 violations were reported while 125 were reported during the same span in 2020.
City councilmember Katherine Gilmore Richardson had introduced legislation earlier this year to lower the curfew time.
“We’ve seen increased rates of young people involved with crime and criminal incidents simply because they are out too late,” Richardson told NBC10 in September.
The NBC10 Investigators also discovered that between July 7 and September 19 of 2022, 113 juveniles were charged with violent crimes, compared to 120 during that same period in 2021 and 116 in 2020.
However, an analysis of gun violence data also revealed the number of juvenile shootings at night increased during the time the previous curfew was implemented.
Between July 7 and September 19 of 2022, 30 children were shot between 9:30 p.m. and 6 a.m., compared to 15 children during that same time period in 2021 and 25 children during the same span in 2020.
“If the logic is that those numbers should be going down, clearly they don’t appear to be going down as a result of the curfew,” David Wilson, a criminologist with George Mason University, told NBC10 in September.
Wilson, who studies curfews in cities across the country, believes that they are ineffective.
“There was no evidence that juvenile curfews are accomplishing what we want them to accomplish,” Wilson said.
Richardson responded to Wilson’s comments during NBC10’s report in September.
“My response is that we’re going to do all that we can to help as many young people as we can in the city of Philadelphia and get them off the streets and into safe spaces,” Richardson said.
The city also opened two curfew centers earlier this year. The NBC10 Investigators found that very few juvenile curfew violators in the city had been taken to those centers however.
