Curfew for minors raises question of ‘personal freedom’

What does it mean to have personal freedoms, and for whom are those freedoms protected?

San Marcos City Council sought to answer this question on Tuesday at its second public hearing over the City of San Marcos's juvenile curfew ordinance.

“I think we’ve heard some very compelling arguments, for and against,” Councilmember Jude Prather said. “There were some good points brought up about our court system and our legal system. When people get caught up into it, next thing you know it compounds things, failure to appear, I think we’ve criminalized a lot of the things that go on in our society.

“I say this before and I say this again — one of the most important roles of government is public safety, but as an American citizen, another part of that is protecting people’s personal freedoms.”

Sarah Teale, a San Marcos resident and mom of two home-schooled boys, believes that the juvenile curfew ordinance is a direct violation of personal freedom.

Teale, who recently gathered 123 signatures on her petition opposing the juvenile curfew ordinance, wrote the following statement in a letter to city council: “Childhood freedom is diminishing at such a fast rate that research is finding young adults who don’t know how to exist without their ever present helicopter parents. Kids who go to college and have their parents calling in to sort problems with their college professors, because they don’t know how to exist in a world where they have to make choices and interact with adults. This ordinance absolutely moves the needle towards less freedom - to the extreme.”

San Marcos’ juvenile curfew ordinance was adopted in 1994, and Texas Local Government Code requires municipalities to review their juvenile curfew ordinances every three years.

The ordinance applies to minors between ages 10 and 17 and sets a daytime curfew from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on school days and two night time curfews, one from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. Sunday through Thursday and one from 12 a.m. to 6 a.m. Friday and Saturday. Violating curfew is a Class C Misdemeanor and carries a fine of up to $500.

At the first public hearing on Tuesday, Nov. 15, the council motioned to add amendments changing the fine amount for curfew violations to $50 and requiring the city to collect and present data around the use of the curfew policy upon each renewal.

The council also asked the San Marcos Police Department, the agency tasked with enforcing the curfew, to come back with more clear data on the ordinance’s effectiveness.

According to the data Chief of Police Stan Standridge presented on Tuesday, 87 curfew violation citations have been issued since 2017. Of those 87 citations, two were issued in 2022.

“All year, two tickets,” Standridge said. “You would think that we are injudiciously issuing citations to everybody for these offenses, and that’s why all of our citizens are upset. Folks, we’re talking about two.”

Standridge also shared three anecdotes from school resource officers speaking out in favor of the juvenile court ordinance and part of his conversation with Municipal Court Judge Maggie Moreno, who he says hears at least one truancy case a week.

“Imagine if we don’t have that tool, and the students leave,” Standridge said. “What are we about to do to truancy? What are we about to do to truancy court?”

Standridge highlighted in his presentation that SMPD is more focused on its strategic initiatives — reducing traffic crashes and violent crime — than issuing tickets for curfew violations.

“I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but we’ve now had 15 traffic fatalities for this city,” he said. “Nobody should be okay with that number. My encouragement to all of us is that we need a laser beam focus on what’s important now.”

Standridge’s presentation opened up to a public hearing, in which community members were invited to provide feedback on the ordinance in view of the data.

“It was really unfortunate that the presentation that the chief gave was not in the packet that we all got to see online,” said Maxfield Baker, former city council member Place 1. “And he tends to do this, where all of the sudden there’s this great presentation full of quotes and all these things but guess what? The community, us, that are trying to rally and push against a policy like this, have no time to act truly to defend against that.”

Councilmember Mark Gleason, next to offer his comments, addressed community concerns that the ordinance would in effect create a “police state.”

“This notion that this is creating a police state I think is just hyperbole, I really do,” he said. “They issued two tickets last year, [and] out of 87, 39 were deferred, dismissed, whatever, and only five [were] convicted out of 87.”

Councilmember Shane Scott shared his concern over Section 54.079 of the ordinance, which contains defenses against prosecution for juveniles who are caught violating curfew.

Scott made a motion to add home school to the list of defenses to prosecution, and the motion passed 7-0.

The council members also voted unanimously to place the ordinance back on next week’s agenda for a second reading, with the recommendation that it goes to the Criminal Justice Reform Committee for review.