Annapolis Mayor Ellen O. Moyer has asked city leaders to consider imposing a curfew on youths citywide or on all residents of the 10 public housing communities after the shooting death this week of a 17-year-old boy.
She is also calling on city lawmakers to consider requiring those entering public housing to show identification or proof of residency, and starting a gun buyback program in the state capital, where four homicides have occurred this year, half the record eight in 2007.
Though a 2002 proposal to adopt a citywide curfew after another spate of violence went nowhere in the face of public opposition, Moyer said that people are demanding it now.
"Times change, and the criteria by which you judge the value of these programs change," she said yesterday. "So there's nothing wrong with looking at it with new eyes today in terms of today's world that we're living in."
Officials with the American Civil Liberties Union, while applauding the city's eagerness to get a handle on crime, said they oppose any curfews, and that singling out public housing residents is highly discriminatory.
"We believe that juvenile curfew laws are unconstitutional because they violate the rights of both young people and their parents," said Meredith Curtis, a spokeswoman for the ACLU of Maryland. "A curfew targeting a juvenile in public housing raises a different level of concern because, at that point, it raises the question of discrimination of poor kids. You can't single out a population according to their wealth, or lack of wealth, for discrimination. Poor kids have every right as affluent kids to exist in their communities."
Moyer's latest efforts to rein in crime come weeks after the launch of Capital City Safe Streets, a state and federally organized initiative to fund more streamlined crime-fighting, including additional lighting and security cameras in public housing communities and programs to mentor and counsel youths in Annapolis.
Talk of a curfew emerged this week, after Kwame Travon Johnson, an Annapolis High School junior, was fatally shot Sunday night in the Robinwood public housing community. His body was found on the sidewalk about 11 p.m.
The city council's Public Safety Committee, consisting of three aldermen, called an emergency meeting Tuesday, where Moyer's ideas were met with wariness. Alderman David Cordle, the committee chairman, had introduced the failed bill for a youth curfew in 2002, but he withdrew it under pressure from the public and the ACLU.
