Mayor to bring back curfew for Baltimore City youth
By Lisa Robinson
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BALTIMORE (WBAL) — After a chaotic scene at the Inner Harbor led to two teens shot and multiple arrests, Mayor Brandon Scott is planning to enforce a new curfew for young people.
“They’re not just kids coming from east and west Baltimore. I spoke to young people last night who were from Owings Mills. This is about us doing everything in our power to keep them safe,” Scott said.
When he was a city councilman, he updated the curfew ordinance, which says children under the age of 14 must be inside by 9 p.m., while teens ages 14-16 must be inside by 10 p.m. on school nights and 11 p.m. on non-school nights. Starting Memorial Day, the city will once again open youth connection centers.
“Never will I say that curfew and curfew alone is about saving young people from committing acts of violence. It is about another tool in keeping our young people safe and finding out what we need to do to help those young people who are just clearly unsupervised, and in many cases, unsupported,” Scott said.
He said the youth connection centers will offer young people and their families wrap-around services, and he hopes they accept them.
“If they don’t, we get to a certain point, then it gets turned over to the court and the court decides what happens.”
The mayor has not yet announced a date for the curfew to go into effect.
The Baltimore Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3 released a statement, saying, in part, the police department’s manpower is so significantly deflated that it is barely able to respond to regular calls for service in a timely manner.
We Our Us, a community action group, walked the streets of Baltimore Monday night aiming to bring peace after a violent weekend.
Corey Barnes, the group’s director, said they’re taking matters into their own hands.
“We are not waiting in our office for our young people to come to us. We’re coming to them,” Barnes said.
The group is planning to engage with teens over the summer. They even have a “stop the beef” hotline to help mediate arguments.
“We’ll be connecting resources (and) jobs. If they need rehab, we have somebody with us that will put you in a car to go and get rehab if it’s a beef or mediation,” Barnes said. “You have to bring positive, constructive leadership into the place to begin to give a model that begins to transform thinking, to transform hearts and to transform minds.”
To learn more about the We Our Us movement, visit their website.
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