The Chicago City Council passed a “snap” curfew ordinance on June 18 that allows the superintendent to impose short-notice curfews. Two days later, Mayor Brandon Johnson issued the first veto in 19 years by a Chicago mayor. On Wednesday, the City Council failed to overturn the mayor’s veto.

The measure had many critics, and Superintendent Larry Snelling himself expressed mixed opinions on the ordinance. Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd) introduced it to address “teen trends” — events where young people gather in public places that sometimes turn violent. 

If the City Council had overridden the mayor’s veto, the ordinance would have allowed the police superintendent, after consulting with the deputy mayor of community safety, to call for a curfew with 30 minutes’ notice at any time and anywhere in the city if “there is probable cause to believe that a mass gathering will occur.” A “mass gathering” was defined as 20 or more people — regardless of age — assembled in a public place in a manner likely to result in “substantial harm to public health, safety or welfare.”

ABC 7 reported Hopkins saying of the power, “It’s based on when these teen takeovers actually occur … It is declared in response to what’s happening, and then after the event is over, the curfew lapses until such time it needs to be brought forth again.”

Snelling was skeptical about the 30-minute notice, although he has advocated for the use of curfews beyond what’s currently on the books, according to WBEZ. 

Earlier drafts of the ordinance had required that the superintendent and the deputy mayor jointly determine the need for the curfew. The wording in the final draft raised red flags for Alexandra Block, director of the Criminal Legal Systems and Policing Project of ACLU-Illinois. Block worried that the change gave the superintendent too much power with too little oversight.

Block was also concerned with the way the proposed curfew used the phrase “probable cause.” Typically, the legal standard of “probable cause” is based on past or current behavior, not a suspicion about future events. It allows an officer to arrest someone if they have “probable cause to believe that the person has committed or is committing any crime.” But Block said the proposal instead allowed the superintendent to call a curfew if he believed a mass gathering would occur. She told BGA Policy that she wasn’t aware of “probable cause” being used as a standard to predict future events.

Current Curfew Law vs. Proposed Ordinance

Under current city law, unsupervised minors 12 and older have a curfew of 10 p.m. Those younger than 12 have an 8:30 p.m. curfew on school nights and a 9 p.m. curfew on Fridays and Saturdays. All curfews last until 6 a.m. the next day.

Under the proposed ordinance, the superintendent could have declared a curfew at any time that would run for three hours and could be extended. Any declared snap curfews would have been in addition to the existing curfews.

The snap curfew could have been declared for any area: throughout the ‘L’ system, a specific neighborhood or even the whole city.

Comparison to Other Cities

BGA Policy analyzed the municipal codes of four other large cities — New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Phoenix — and found nothing resembling the proposed snap curfew. The closest was the power of the New York City mayor to call for emergency curfews, which would apply to everyone in the city, not just minors. But New York doesn’t have standing citywide curfews like Chicago and the other three cities. 

The next closest is Houston, where the mayor has the power to extend the curfew to include the hours between 9 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. on a weekday, but even this curfew needs to be announced at least seven days before it becomes effective and is ordered by the mayor at the recommendation of the chief of police.

Otherwise, the curfews of LA, Houston and Phoenix resemble Chicago’s, in place around 10 p.m. and ending the following morning, either at sunrise or a specific time. Houston’s, like Chicago’s, has a different time on school nights.

Defenses and First Amendment Rights

Chicago’s proposed curfew ordinance had the same First Amendment protections as the current law — allowing people to defend against a curfew violation if they were exercising rights such as free speech, peaceful assembly or religious expression.

However, the proposed ordinance added a layer of protection by requiring the police superintendent to create written rules to prevent officers from enforcing the curfew against those engaged in constitutionally protected activity.

But this didn’t ease concerns about suppressing people’s voices, especially those of Black and Brown youths in Chicago. Block said the ACLU was concerned that the ordinance would “discourage young people from gathering for First Amendment-protected actions such as protests and violence-interruption actions.” The proposal “sends a discriminatory message to Black and Brown youth that they are not welcome in public forums downtown.”

The city has a checkered history when it comes to protecting First Amendment rights. One recent example is the protests outside the Democratic National Convention last year. A WBEZ investigation found that of the 62 cases the city prosecuted against protesters, about half were dismissed without trial. Of those that went to trial, the city hasn’t won a single one. Four cases were still pending when the investigation was published.

Amanda Yarusso, a civil rights attorney who represented some of the DNC defendants, told WBEZ that CPD’s response to the DNC protests calls into question whether it should be granted further powers.

Yarusso told the Triibe: “The concern is that this would subject Black and Brown teenagers to the same over-policing we’ve seen in the past that violates equal protection rights and is harmful and unjust.”

In response to questions about First Amendment concerns, a representative from Hopkins’ office pointed to Knowlton v. City of Wauwatosa, saying the curfew in that case was found to be at a “permissible time, place, and manner restriction under the First Amendment. The curfew was found to be content-neutral, the city had the right to institute in the interest of public safety, was narrowly tailored, and left open ample alternative channels for communication.”

Consent Decree

CPD is under a federal consent decree that stemmed in part from an officer fatally shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014. The decree lists reforms that CPD and the city of Chicago are required to implement. The city is in full compliance with about 15% of the decree.

BGA Policy identified five paragraphs under the Community Policing section of the consent decree that directly relate to policing youth. CPD is in preliminary compliance (meaning policies are in place, training is not done) with two paragraphs and is in secondary compliance (training is offered) with the remaining three. It is not in full compliance (where the policy is standard procedure) with any of the five paragraphs relating to policing youth under the Community Policing section of the consent decree.

Conclusion

If the City Council had overridden the mayor’s veto to enact the proposed snap curfew ordinance, the power granted to CPD’s superintendent would have been inconsistent with the powers granted to top cops in other large U.S. cities, and would have even been odd compared to the powers of other mayors. It came at a time when CPD is still far from being in full compliance with the consent decree and would have granted powers that the superintendent had expressed some skepticism about and the mayor did not want granted.