Barring another outbreak of teen trends-turned-violent, the heated debate over “snap curfews” in Chicago is being put to rest.
The City Council put the nail in the legislative coffin on Wednesday by upholding Mayor Brandon Johnson’s one and only veto.
Thirty-four votes were needed to override Johnson’s veto. The override fell six votes short.
The ordinance that would have empowered Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling to declare three-hour curfews anywhere in the city with 30 minutes’ notice was approved last month by a 27-22 vote.
Johnson was so confident of the outcome, he took a victory lap before Wednesday’s vote.
Surrounded by his Council allies and youth advocates outside the mayor’s office, Johnson reiterated his now-familiar argument that empowering Chicago police officers to sweep wayward youth off the streets would not only be “counterproductive to the progress” Chicago has made in reducing homicides, shootings and other violent crime, but it would create tensions between residents and police so vital to solving violent crime “at a time when we have worked so hard to rebuild that trust.”
“When I was elected two years ago, I made a pledge not to simply do the easy thing, but to do the right thing,” Johnson told the cheering crowd. “The easy thing to do would be to play into the political theater of safety. The easy thing to do would be to tell people that, if we threaten young people and families with severe repercussions that that somehow would make us safer.
“But we know from years of doing the same old tired forms of policy that it doesn’t get the results that people have longed for. It doesn’t keep us safe, and it doesn’t make our city stronger.”
Doing “the right thing” is to “invest in people” by creating jobs, recreational, training and mental health programs for young people who crave those opportunities, but don’t have enough of them in the South and West Side neighborhoods where they live, Johnson said.
He told the cheering crowd there is “no study that we have seen, or frankly anyone in Chicago has seen” that suggests that curfews will keep young people safe.
“In fact, if we were to enact such a thing, we would leave ourselves vulnerable to potential and costly lawsuits that do nothing to make our city safer,” he said.
Johnson frequently points to the tangible progress being made by his “holistic” strategy of having police work with community-based “violence interrupters” while investing more in young people to confront the “root causes” of crime.
He reiterated that point again Wednesday, saying Chicago is coming off the “safest Memorial Day weekend in 16 years” and the “least violent July Fourth weekend” in six years.
“To build on that progress, we must lean into the strategies that have been working, investments that have been working. … It doesn’t mean criminalizing our young people,” Johnson said.
“As we address the root causes of crime, we must continue to strategically deploy our officers to high-crime areas rather than dictate their time in enacting and enforcing curfews.”
Reynia Jackson, a youth organizer for the group Good Kids Mad City, told the crowd she has “lost a lot of people that I call family” over the years. She said she was angry, lost and in pain. She said she lost her “sense of safety and trust” in systems that are “supposed to protect us.”
That’s why she joined Good Kids Mad City — to build opportunities for young people like herself, keep them off the streets and “put money in their pockets.”
“We don’t need more control. We need to feel human again. We need to feel like our lives matter. And if you pass this ordinance, you’re saying the exact opposite,” Jackson said.
Jackson said she knows how hard it already is to “be a young person just trying to survive.” The last thing Chicago needs is to “give police even more power to decide where we can go and when we can exist in public with just 30 minutes” warning.
“That’s not safety. That’s targeting. That’s trauma added on to more trauma. This curfew would allow police to shut down parks and beaches and public spaces — the few places where we can go to breathe — and turn them into war zones … and zones of punishment, and for what? For being young in our city? For being Black and Brown in our city?” she asked.