Tampa City Council member Gwen Henderson, whose district includes Ybor City, suggested a 1 a.m. curfew for six months in response to last month’s shooting that killed two people.
“What effects will this [closure] have on the economy?” Tom DeGeorge, president and GM of Crowbar, said at the city council meeting. “With the rising cost of rent, people can barely pay their bills. I think this would be detrimental to all these businesses.”
Even without the public pushback against the curfew, Tampa’s City Attorney, Andrea Zelman, told council that such a curfew wasn’t legally advisable. Instead, she drafted a possible juvenile curfew ordinance for consideration.
“We don’t have a mechanism to tell businesses to shut down wholesale at a particular time,” Zelman said at the meeting. “The one exception to that is the Florida Statutes expressly allow for a juvenile curfew, and so that’s why we are bringing that to you.” “The Orlando model is very promising … I think dissecting and analyzing their plan is the first step.”
Shots were fired on Seventh Avenue early in the morning of Oct. 29, killing a 14-year-old boy named Elijah Wilson and a 22-year-old named Harrison Boonstoppel. An additional 15 people were wounded. One suspect, Tyrell Stephen Phillips, is charged with second-degree murder and pleaded not guilty at his arraignment last Friday. Two additional suspects are still at large, and the FBI created a portal for anonymous tips.
Zelman said the Florida Supreme Court found the city’s original juvenile curfew, adopted in the ’90s, unconstitutional. The city’s Ybor Child Protection ordinance, which is still on the books, hasn’t been enforced due to similar concerns that the code could be unconstitutional. If passed, the juvenile curfew proposal would also “clean up the code” in the Ybor Child Protection ordinance to be “100% consistent with Florida Statutes,” according to Zelman.
To pass the juvenile curfew, the council must have two public readings before a final vote. However, some studies have shown that juvenile curfews aren’t effective in preventing crime. Kristen Henning, director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic at Georgetown University, told NPR last year that curfews often target Black communities.
“Several studies across the country have shown that juvenile curfews are ineffective both at reducing crime and reducing victimization,” Henning told NPR. “In some cities, we’ve seen that, you know, crime has gone up instead of down, so they aren’t effective.”
In September, Time reported that cities keep using juvenile curfews despite proven ineffectiveness at reducing crime. Included was a 2015 study looking at youth curfew’s impact on gun violence in Washington, D.C., which showed curfews actually increased incidents of gun violence.
“We find that contrary to its goal of improving public safety, D.C.’s juvenile curfew increases the number of gunfire incidents by 69% [during curfew hours],” the study states.
Tampa Police Chief Lee Bercaw also presented an update on the shooting to the Council last Thursday.
“This wasn’t a situation that brewed,” Bercaw said. “This something that sparked up in seconds and turned to gunfire.”
On the night of the shooting, city officials said an estimated 50 TPD officers were in the vicinity. Bercaw said Orlando has experienced a similar spike in violent crime between the hours of midnight and 4 a.m.
“The Orlando model is very promising,” Bercaw said at the meeting. “I think dissecting and analyzing their plan is the first step.”
Ybor City’s business owners and service industry workers might want to pay attention to what advice Bercaw takes from Orlando.
Last March, Orlando City Council reportedly passed two controversial new measures to restrict nightlife in downtown Orlando.
The first is a six-month moratorium on new downtown clubs, and the second places myriad restrictions on alcohol sales after midnight. That includes wanding at entrances and additional off-duty officers. Any bar with a capacity of 125 people or more wishing to sell alcohol after midnight has to purchase a $250 permit. The pilot program will be in place until it is reviewed in March 2024.
In the recent Ybor City shooting, none of the suspects involved were inside a club at the time of the incident, but out on the street.
“Chief Bercaw was not referring to one specific Orlando ordinance over another, but rather, their approach in the broader sense,” Eddy Durkin, TPD’s public information officer, told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay via email last Friday afternoon. “He is taking proactive steps to improve safety in the city by reviewing ordinances and best practices from other cities, Orlando being a key comparative, for consideration in Tampa.”
CL also contacted the Orlando Police Department’s PIO for more information on the Orlando model — we’ll update this post if they respond.
How a juvenile curfew would impact TPD’s policing efforts remains to be seen. Before last Thursday’s meeting, CL asked what a juvenile curfew might look like for officers and is awaiting a response from TPD. In the meantime, council member Gwen Henderson said at the meeting she heard her district loud and clear on the general curfew.
“The community has spoken, and I greatly appreciate that,” she said at the meeting. “I don’t feel threatened when I bring something forward because there’s always a teachable moment.”
Henderson said at the meeting she plans to look for CRA funding for additional solutions like the Ybor Ambassador program.
Council member Lynn Hurtak asked for a community conversation between TPD, residents, business owners, and other concerned parties. A date is yet to be determined.
For longtime community advocate Connie Burton, the recent shooting is an example of the lack of investment in the city’s youth from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
“You do not want to pour real money into these communities and expect those issues to solve themselves?” Burton said at the meeting. “They will not. There’s going to be more killings.”
This story first appeared in our sister publication Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.
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This article appears in Nov 1-7, 2023.