Curfews Without Consultation: Why Cities Govern Youth Without Governing With Us
By Victoria Nwankwo
For seven months, Atlanta’s city government debated where teenagers were allowed to be. Council members, police, business owners, parents, and the mayor all had a place in that conversation. No teenager did.
It began in November 2022, when six people were shot near Atlantic Station, including 12-year-old Zyion Charles and 15-year-old Cameron Jackson, who were both killed. Days later, then-Council Member Keisha Sean Waites proposed a citywide 7 p.m. curfew for youth 17 and younger, far beyond the existing rule barring minors 16 and younger from public places unsupervised after 11 p.m., or midnight on weekends.
The proposal never passed. The council tabled it more than once, citing a need for more crime data, and a revised 8 p.m. version also failed to gain support. In June 2023, the council voted 12 to 1 to leave the hours alone and change the penalties instead, dropping the $1,000 fine and possible jail time in favor of a required educational program for parents. Mayor Andre Dickens said publicly that the city risked over-policing young people at the same moment it was trying to show them opportunity.
That is a real deliberative process. It was slow, it heard objections, and the final policy was less restrictive than the proposal that began the debate. But it was also a debate about teenagers in which no teenager participated.
I am not arguing that cities should ignore violence involving young people. We are often the ones most affected by it. I am asking why restricting us is the opening proposal while asking us what would actually make us safer never enters the process at all.
The Cost of Representation
That question carries weight because curfew enforcement has never fallen evenly. In 2020, the arrest rate for curfew and loitering violations was 53.3 per 100,000 Black youth compared with 33.1 per 100,000 white youth, and the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention reports that Black youth have faced curfew petition rates roughly two to three-and-a-half times the white rate for at least 17 years. The young people most likely to be stopped under a curfew are the least likely to have been in the room where it was written.
Getting into those rooms costs something, too. CIRCLE found that 19% of young people who often struggle financially had participated in a local group, compared with about 30% of those who were financially stable or wealthy, with a similar gap in volunteering. A meeting during school hours, an unpaid advisory seat, or an event across town is hardest to reach for a young person who works, rides the bus, or has responsibilities at home. When cities do open the door, the young people with the most flexibility are the ones who walk through it.
I know what the other version looks like, because I have worked on it. As a Senior Just Youth Staff member at the Partnership for Southern Equity, I helped run a transit equity project that did not ask young people to react to an agenda adults had already built. It paid youth-led teams to go find out what their peers actually needed.[7]
The answers came back quickly. Three youth advocates surveyed 137 young people about MARTA, including students they met while tabling at Georgia State. The top concern was accessibility: the system does not reach enough of the places young people need to go. A second team, One Talent, Inc., had ten youth leaders document their own daily commutes, and the same three barriers repeated: long waits, limited routes, and fares they could not afford. That team then studied transit in London, Copenhagen, Dubai, and New York and came back with fixes, including clearer real-time arrival information and better safety features.
Two mini grants of $3,000 and a few months of work produced that. It is not a mandate, and 137 responses do not settle policy for a city this size. But it is more specific youth input than a seven-month curfew debate generated at any budget. The answers were there, and they were cheap to get.
We also helped plan a candidate forum on transportation with Propel ATL, and Just Youth staff interviewed Mayor Dickens. Our position was that young riders should have free or reduced fare transit. He told us he supported reducing cost barriers for young people.
Nothing has moved since. Fares are MARTA’s decision rather than the mayor’s, so his agreement was never going to be enough on its own. But MARTA’s reduced fare program still covers seniors, riders with disabilities, and Medicare cardholders, not young people. The only youth discount runs through schools, which buy discounted passes and decide for themselves whether to charge students for them. The young person who told us they could not afford the fare is exactly where they were when we asked.
I am not saying anyone lied to us. I am saying agreement is where the process stopped. That is the pattern I keep running into. Institutions are much better at listening than at responding.
Examining the Evidence
This is why I keep coming back to curfews. The research on whether they reduce crime is mixed at best. OJJDP points to a meta-analysis of 12 studies that found no statistically significant effect on youth criminal behavior during curfew hours, and its broader review concluded that the evidence does not demonstrate curfews reduce youth crime overall.
That research is not the center of my argument, though. Suppose curfews clearly worked. A city would still have spent months deciding where teenagers can be without asking one teenager what they knew. Effectiveness would tell us a policy was worth having, not that it was arrived at legitimately.
If teenagers are gathering in a shopping district late at night, we know things a police report cannot tell you. Are there affordable places to spend time? Can we get there on public transportation? I already know how young people answer that, because we asked them. The routes do not go far enough, the waits are too long, and the fare costs more than a lot of us can pay. A curfew tells a teenager where they cannot be at 11 p.m. It does not answer how they were supposed to get anywhere else.
Atlanta already has the capacity to involve young people at scale. In 2025, the city’s Summer Youth Employment Program employed nearly 6,000 young people. If Atlanta can create that many opportunities for youth to work within the city, it can also create meaningful ways for us to help shape the policies that affect us. Young people should not only be brought in after decisions are made or asked for feedback that disappears into a report. When a policy directly affects teenagers, we should have a place in the conversation before it reaches a final vote. And when young people offer recommendations, we should be able to see what happened to them.
Adults worry that young people are disengaging from democracy. I think we should ask what our institutions are teaching us about it. If a teenager attends forums, fills out surveys, speaks to candidates, and never learns whether any of it affected a decision, their frustration should not be filed away as apathy. They may have simply learned what the institution is good at.
It is easy to tell a young person that their voice matters. The harder part is giving them evidence that it does.
Victoria Nwankwo is a sociology major and African American Studies minor at Emory University whose work focuses on youth civic engagement and education equity. As Senior Youth Staff at the Partnership for Southern Equity, she supports youth organizing and community-led advocacy across the South. She is also a Newman Civic Fellow and serves on Unify America’s National Student Advisory Board.
