Pittsburgh City Council scrapped a controversial plan Wednesday to reinstate enforcement of a youth curfew. Members voted down the bill at the request of the proposal's sponsor, City Council President Theresa Kail-Smith. Doing so, she said, would allow the city to take a new approach.
"I'm just asking to please vote it down until we have an opportunity to discuss more,” said Kail-Smith.
At the same time, Kail-Smith put forward a new measure to focus on establishing "resource centers," which would provide social services for kids and families in neighborhoods with higher rates of youth violence. The bill calls for a nine-member committee to study the issue.
Council gave preliminary approval to that proposal on Wednesday. It could receive a final vote next week.
The idea of a strictly enforcing a curfew received mixed reaction from business owners and community members since Kail-Smith first introduced a bill to evaluate it a week ago.
A curfew for residents under the age of 17 already exists in the city code, but it’s rarely enforced. Kail-Smith's original idea was to form a committee that would determine whether enforcing it would reduce violence, and whether the city could bring curfew violators to so-called “curfew centers,” to be picked up by their guardians.
The original bill would not have re-imposed the curfew, but only study the idea of doing so. But Mayor Ed Gainey was never on board with the proposal. Administration officials said their own research determined that “considerable barriers” complicate curfew enforcement, like forcing people to show ID without probable cause.
Gainey did applaud Kail-Smith’s new bill Wednesday.
“We believe that providing opportunities for our kids while providing social services for their families is a critical tool in our Plan for Peace,” Gainey said in a statement. “It is going to take all of us working together to help end the violence. I’m proud to be working with City Council and look forward to continuing our partnership in making Pittsburgh the safest city in America.”
The advisory committee on youth and family resource centers will be comprised of five members appointed by City Council and four appointed by the mayor’s office. The appointments must be made by Feb. 14.
Kail-Smith chided critics for what she said was a misinterpretation of her intention with the curfew bill, which also called for providing social services at the curfew centers.
“It's actually kind of sad to me,” she lamented. “People think that we introduced the curfew … as is and misunderstood that the intention was just ‘let's have a conversation.’”
Kail-Smith left the door open to revisit a discussion about a youth curfew Wednesday. But she argued that if a curfew were to be enforced, the 1995 policy would have to be rewritten: “Policing has changed since 1995… a lot of things have changed since then.”
The city has focused its efforts on violence prevention, at the expense of action to stop violence already taking place, Kail-Smith contended. “Our families are asking for something immediate,” she said. "They want an intervention right now.”
She called the resource centers a “great start,” but warned the city will need to do more to reduce youth violence.
“The kids that are doing the shootings … they aren't going to voluntarily go to a center,” she argued before suggesting the city’s outreach employees be tasked with encouraging kids to go to the facilities.
While the revised measure does not set a strict timeline for when the resource centers would open, Kail-Smith said Wednesday that officials aim to have their plan in place by late spring, just before school lets out for the summer.
Kail-Smith stressed the need to prioritize the issue.
“Our kids don't have time for us to discuss this forever. Our families don't want to hear that it's going to take years before we change a culture,” she said. “They want to know what we're doing today to stop their kids from being shot, and from having to worry about their families and their loved ones.”
