The aftermath of a teen takeover in downtown Chicago in March 2025 (YouTube Screenshot/WGN).
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
It’s debatable whether writer Mark Twain actually uttered that quote, but that doesn’t detract from its truthfulness, especially concerning this country’s history of racism and segregation and the behavior of her governing bodies, which have a history of passing laws that weaponize law enforcement against people of color.
In Chicago, for example, history is doing a whole lot of repeating and rhyming.
The city council is considering a “snap curfew” targeting social media-engineered gatherings or “teen takeovers” from happening in public places, granting Police Supt. Larry Snelling, with consent from the Deputy Mayor of Public Safety, to disband crowds of “20 or more people” when there is “probable cause” that a group is assembling to engage or participate in an activity “likely to result in, criminal conduct.”
This ordinance, led by Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd Ward) and co-sponsored by 30 aldermen, was set to be voted on last Wednesday but got delayed. Still, Hopkins hopes to get it passed before Memorial Day to assuage the concerns of downtown residents and others in affluent areas about having large numbers of teens gather in their neighborhoods during the summer months.
But history tells us and studies reaffirm that curfews like these seldom work and result in more Black people having encounters with police.
They also reinforce a familiar sentiment that too many of us—and by us, I mean Black people—have experienced in Chicago and elsewhere, especially the South, for generations.
“Your kind isn’t welcome here.”
“Two years ago, when we saw the curfew and restrictions put in place around Millennium Park, it was a similar sort of a construct: that certain areas of the city are for some people and not for Black and Brown kids who live in other parts of the community,” said Ed Yohnka, director of communications and public policy for the ACLU of Illinois.
And several generations removed from when city property owners wielded racially restrictive covenants to keep Black people from moving into their neighborhoods, this curfew threatens to invariably reinforce similar boundaries, promoting segregation in one of the most racially-segregated cities in America—another riff off a familiar song.
And yes, the city already has a curfew law in place, but this version, championed by Ald. Hopkins, contains a provision that could have unintended consequences for Black youth who happen to be at the wrong place—likely a majority white neighborhood—at the wrong time and typically when the sun goes down.
History rhyming again.
History Rhymes in Streeterville
Two incidents that occurred on unseasonably warm March nights precipitated the push for the new curfew: a 46-year-old tourist who got struck by a stray bullet on March 9 and a 15-year-old who suffered a graze wound to the leg on March 28, both in the Streeterville neighborhood downtown near where groups of mostly Black teens had gathered.
Both incidents resulted in the arrests of a 15-year-old and a 14-year-old and stoked the outcry for tighter restrictions on teen gatherings. With consent from the deputy mayor of public safety, Snelling can issue a curfew that goes into effect in 30 minutes under the new ordinance.
New Curfew: Little or No Opportunity to Comply
Any teen suspected of participating in that gathering would have 30 minutes to disperse, which is hardly enough notice for them to comply or for their relatives to intervene, say those opposed to the curfew law.
In a statement, the Cook County Public Defender’s office said, in part, that the new curfew gives “little or no opportunity for young people and their caregivers to respond appropriately.”
“Its passage would set the stage for arbitrary sweeps and increase unnecessary and dangerous police interactions with youth.”
There are also fears that the new curfew lacks announcements and other accommodations for teens and their guardians who are not proficient in English.
If the ordinance passes, legal challenges loom. But if it is implemented, it’s hard not to imagine what it would mean to youths of color who happen to be in the vicinity of a declared curfew, especially those not involved in the gathering.
“You’re a young person, and you’ve come to Streeterville to go to the movies, and you’re inside the movie, and you come outside and there’s a curfew in place, and now suddenly you’re having police interaction and being subject to arrest,” said Yohnka in a phone interview with The Chicago Defender.
“That is a likely and probable scenario,” said Yohnka.
Civil Liberties Groups Sound the Alarm
Civil liberties advocates argue the new ordinance doesn’t require CPD authorities to adhere to a curfew time limit, nor does it confine its geographic scope.
Based on the proposal as written,” stated a coalition of organizations in a three-page letter to Ald. Hopkins and the Chicago City Council, “the CPD Superintendent could declare the entire Chicago lakefront to be a curfew zone for all summer months, prohibiting more than 20 young people to assemble at the beach due to the likelihood of a “mass gathering” event.”
“Given the lack of reasonable guardrails, this hasty and ill-considered proposal must be rejected,” they wrote.
History Repeating: Parallels to New York’s “Stop-and-Frisk”
The curfew sounds a lot like New York’s failed “Stop-and-Frisk” policy, which gained notoriety in the 1990s and peaked around the early 2010s, giving police the authority to stop, search and interrogate someone if there’s reasonable suspicion. Officers also used it as a means to racially profile Black and Brown residents.
And despite its use, “Stop-and-Frisk” did not live up to its purpose. It seldom resulted in arrests or gun seizures—about 0.15 out of a hundred stops—even though it was designed to get illegal weapons off the streets.
It led to more officers racially profiling Black and Latino residents, leading to negative encounters and the likelihood of life-and-death events.
Tragically, the poster child for this failed policy was a Black man named Eric Garner, who was eventually choked to death by a New York City police officer in 2014—a stop-and-frisk for selling loose cigarettes.
Stop-and-frisk encounters claimed the lives of other Black men in other cities, like Freddie Gray in Baltimore in 2015 and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.
Curfews Don’t Stop Crime—They Make Things Worse
Similarly, teen curfews don’t live up to their claims of preventing juvenile crime and can increase tensions between youths of color and police.
The Campbell Collaboration, a nonprofit that reviewed a dozen studies, concluded that “a curfew reduces neither juvenile criminal behavior nor juvenile victimization.”
Another study that examined the impact of a Washington, D.C. juvenile curfew found that the number of gunfire incidents increased during curfew hours. It also found that those same curfews might increase domestic violence by “incentivizing at-risk kids (and their caregivers) to be home at night.”
Yohnka and other critics call juvenile curfews a “Band-Aid.”
“If those things worked, then we would have resolved our problems with violent crime a long time ago because we’ve tried all these,” he said, referencing curfews and other overly harsh policing measures that emphasize penalty and punishment.
“The only way we’re really going to address these [problems] is to move beyond the simplistic and actually have a serious discussion about what it means to make the entire city of Chicago, not just downtown, safe,” Yohnka said.
This New Curfew’s Real Target: Black Youth
Teen Takeover in downtown Chicago (YouTube Screenshot/NewsNation).
Ultimately, the new curfew law is less about addressing youth safety and limiting their exposure to law enforcement and more concerned with where these “teen takeovers” occur.
“…as long as they don’t happen in my backyard.”
The double standard is crystal: Unruly gatherings at Cubs home games in Wrigleyville and Lollapalooza in Grant Park? Crickets. When large groups of Black youth gather in areas they aren’t wanted? The calls for more police, more arrests become blares.
If only more energy were directed toward providing Black and Brown youth with more opportunities, which is what any parent would want for their children.
But alas, history tells us that’s not what laws like this new curfew are really about.
At a moment when a Republican-led federal government is targeting people of color, Black and Brown teens in an overwhelmingly Democratic city have to be careful where they are and wonder which neighborhoods would welcome them.
If you’re keeping score at home, our two main political parties—one federal and the other local—are endorsing a familiar move when it comes to people of color: that’s one of exclusion, control and police enforcement.
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
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