Hotel Haya in Ybor City, Florida. Credit: Photo by Attila Adam/Adobe

At the final Tampa City Council meeting of 2023, council members voted 4-2 to advance a proposed juvenile curfew ordinance to its second reading and final vote later this month. The vote came just two months after gunfire killed two people, including a 14-year-old boy, and injured 16 others during an Oct. 29 shooting in Ybor City.

“I’m disappointed that this conversation and the urgency just came when this happened in Ybor City,” Robin Lockett, local organizer, said at the meeting. “East Tampa has been crying out about gun violence for years.”

Councilwoman Gwen Henderson, who initially proposed a curfew ordinance in November, was absent from the vote due to her mother’s hospitalization. Council members Bill Carlson and Lynn Hurtak voted against the ordinance’s advancement, citing concerns over how little data has been presented to the Council.

“The very simple question is, has it worked in any city where it’s been implemented?” Carlson said at the meeting. “We don’t even know that basic question.”

The proposed citywide ordinance prohibits youth under the age of 16 from being out after 11 p.m. and could result in a $50 fine.

City attorney Andrea Zelman presented a chart of juvenile calls for service in Tampa as the only data for the ordinance’s first reading.

“One of the data points that I wasn’t aware of until yesterday… is how many juvenile-related calls come in from districts all over the city,” Zelman said.

District 3 Commander Major Eric DeFelice, whose 24-square-mile district includes Ybor City, presented what TPD now says is an ongoing citywide problem. Areas in all three districts showed combined violent and property crimes shaded based on frequency, from zero to 10 instances or more. From Jan. 1, 2022, until Nov. 30, 2023, Tampa had 615 “juvenile calls for service.” That means any call with the keywords “minor,” “juvenile,” “juv,” or “juvie.”

Hurtak asked DeFelice what would happen to youth picked up under the proposed curfew.

“This is an ordinance that we’re talking about passing, so it is very new in nature,” DeFelice said. “To say that we have all the guidelines thought of and policies in place, that would be incorrect because we haven’t had time to speak to council, to the members of the community, to see exactly what would happen.”

Hurtak said that without a clear plan, the council should wait to vote on the ordinance.

“Major DeFeliece, you made my point for me, which is we don’t have systems in place,” Hurtak said. “To me, it’s completely unacceptable for us as a body to approve an ordinance that doesn’t have steps to follow.”

Many in the community voiced concerns over the proposed ordinance.

“We have funded the police department over and over and over, and y’all have said yourselves that violent crime continues to increase,” Angel D’Angelo, cofounder of the Restorative Justice Coalition, said at the meeting.

D’Angelo encouraged Council members to research violence interruption programs in cities like Chicago and Baltimore. In contrast to a growing body of evidence on the ineffectiveness of juvenile curfews, intervention programs like Baltimore’s have shown success.

A recent report from Johns Hopkins on Safe Streets Baltimore found that homicides in five of the longest-running sites were “32% lower than in the first four years of program implementation.”

The analysis also noted that the Safe Streets program had reduced nonfatal shootings by 23%.

A study published last month by Northwestern researchers found that those who completed Chicago’s gun violence reduction-aimed Create Real Economic Destiny or CRED program were 73% less likely to have an arrest for a violent crime compared to those who didn’t participate.

“We also know from police officers that it’s going to burden them,” Carlson said. “Why would we want to put a burden on police officers and potentially commit civil rights violations if we don’t even know if it’s worked in any other cities?”

A 2016 review of 12 studies on juvenile curfews found the practice “ineffective at reducing crime and victimization.”

Tampa Police Chief Lee Bercaw, who didn’t attend the Dec. 21 meeting, is supposed to present his updated public safety master plan sometime this year. It isn’t clear if that plan includes violence intervention programs like Chicago’s or Baltimore’s. Bercaw has said repeatedly that he is looking at Orlando as a “model city” for how Tampa can respond to the Oct. 29 shooting.

“The crisis in Ybor City has been a long crisis in East Tampa,” Connie Burton, community organizer, said at the meeting.

Burton raised concerns about how TPD will enforce the ordinance in a community with many youth in crisis.

“Are they [TPD] social workers now?” Burton asked.

Carlson’s motion for city staff to give a report on whether juvenile curfews have reduced violent crime rates in other cities passed unanimously.

“We just heard that the city doesn’t have answers to almost any of the questions,” Carlson said at the meeting. “We know where the ordinance came from, we know who originated the idea. We don’t know any of the data.”

That report is slated to come immediately before the final ordinance vote on Jan. 25 at 9:30 a.m.

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