GREENSBORO, NC -- Twenty-one children as young as eleven were ensnared by the city of Greensboro's emergency 60-day downtown youth curfew according to a letter from Chief of Police Ken Miller. Nine warnings, eight citations and four arrests were effected, eight of which involved youths sixteen or younger. The estimated cost of enforcing the curfew was, according to the letter, $81,800 and required a deployment of an additional 107 officers representing an extra 2,046 personnel hours.
The letter did not specify the ages or races of those who were arrested. This blogger has asked the city of Greensboro for that information.
The curfew was put into place on July 3rd during an emergency city council meeting called by Mayor Robbie Perkins following wildly inaccurate media reports, primarily from local TV stations WGHP and WFMY, of "hundreds" of teens brawling in the streets of downtown—reports refuted by the Greensboro Police Department, which the TV stations never substantiated and which brought world-wide disgrace to Greensboro including a permanent ignominious addition to Greensboro's Wikipedia entry. Mayor Perkins twice declined to correct the misinformation when given the opportunity. No other council members took the initiative to publicly correct the erroneous reports either.
Council representatives who voted in favor of the curfew were: Mayor Robbie Perkins, Marikay Abuzuaiter, Nancy Hoffman, Yvonne Johnson, Jim Kee, Zack Matheny, Nancy Vaughan and Tony Wilkins. T. Dianne Bellamy-Small was the lone no vote.
UPDATE: A police spokesperson reports that those arrested for violating the curfew were sixteen and seventeen years-old; all were African-American.
[This post corrected at 5:08 P.M.]
"The estimated cost of enforcing the curfew was, according to the letter, $81,800 and required a deployment of an additional 107 officers representing an extra 2,046 personnel hours."
ReplyDeleteKinda says it all right there. The problem never was teenagers, the problem all along was not enough cops to handle the crowds.
But rather than hire, train and equip police officers, Nancy Vaughan, Robbie Perkins and the rest of Council prefers to spend money on performing arts centers. Shows where their priorities are.