On Wednesday, the town of Greensboro, N.C. imposed a curfew on all teens under the age of 18 – all because some rowdy teens participated in a brawl this past weekend.
According to the local Fox affiliate, hundreds of teens and young adults fought outside of local night club on Saturday night. The local police ended up using pepper spray, a stun gun and back-up from the local university to control the crowd, and 11 people were arrested.
Superficially, some people can consider the curfew – which takes place between the hours of 11pm and 6am – an overreaction to an isolated incident. After all, teens have always been rowdy – just watch the musical “West Side Story”. While a curfew could become a source of anti-authoritarian angst for teens that drives further ill-will toward the local government, a deeper look into the issue shows that local authorities have both the right and the duty to act.
The Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says that “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Thus, if the federal government imposed a curfew in Greensboro it would be considered unconstitutional. But Greensboro itself has the police power to protect the general public’s health, safety, morals, and general welfare of the public. By that logic, maintaining public order—which is what the curfew was imposed to do—is one of any government’s fundamental purposes.
Moreover, a curfew would both deter some potential brawlers from acting in the first place and offer police a clear and legal means to deal with the undeterred. Punishments ought not to be severe, but even a minor slap on the wrist could teach a basic and valuable—if often forgotten—lesson: that actions have consequences. Ideally, such punishments and lessons should come from non-governmental sources, such as parents and families. But as stable family grows increasingly rare, they have to come from somewhere.
Curfews may sound terrible, but unless families and communities step up to teach younger generations, they’re the least bad option. As for teenagers, the only true way to convince leaders to remove curfews is to prove through personal responsibility that they’re not needed.
As one Greensboro teen not involved in the riot told the local Fox affiliate: “First of all, just stop, for all you juvenile delinquents…it’s not really worth doing whatever you’re doing. You ruin it for us, for me.”
