Wilson Building Bulletin: Tightening curfews and banning cell phones for D.C. kids

Before the long weekend, read what local lawmakers have been up to. You can jump to stories here:

There’s a tighter summer curfew in effect for kids

While plenty of discussions in the D.C. Council around criminal justice issues feature spirited debate and disagreement over whether and how the punishments might meet the crimes (or not), this week lawmakers seemed uniformly exasperated that they were voting to impose a tighter youth curfew for the summer.

“A few young people have really ruined it for the rest,” said At-Large Councilmember Robert White, referring to the recent trend of mass youth gatherings in D.C. hot spots like Navy Yard, The Wharf, and U Street that prompted Mayor Muriel Bowser last month to propose expanding the current youth curfew of midnight for anyone 17 or under.

Bowser asked to bring the citywide curfew up an hour to 11 p.m., and make it apply to kids 18 and under. She also proposed 15-day enhanced curfew zones in designated areas where no group of three kids could congregate after 7 p.m. (Those zones could be moved around the city, but would have to be announced ahead of enforcement.)

The council’s version of her emergency bill made tweaks to what lawmakers said were necessary guardrails on what Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen called “an incredibly crude tool” to address public safety. The new 11 p.m. curfew remained intact, but the council changed Bowser’s designated zones by changing the curfew to 8 p.m., specifying that groups of eight or more would constitute a violation (up from the three the mayor proposed), and requiring police to give two verbal warnings before detaining kids for violating the curfew.

“The goal is how do we provide MPD the tool needed while also minimizing harm? A group of young people grabbing ice cream or leaving a basketball court could have gotten caught up in the original language,” said Ward 5 Councilmember Zachary Parker, who worked on amending Bowser’s bill. “We strike the right balance here.”

Lawmakers did say the city should continue to offer kids more summer programming, but also conceded that, in some cases, government intervention could only do so much. At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson read out the ages and times that some juveniles had recently been picked up by police in violation of the city’s curfew. 

“Three a.m. Why are you out? I’m not entirely sure what you’re doing at those times. I think we have to have a larger conversation about these particular issues,” she said.

As for White, he said he wished kids would apply the same “streetlight rule” he grew up with, but also recognized that the council acting to tighten the juvenile curfew might be better than some of the alternatives for the summer that’s still left.

“We have to do something. If we don’t, I think we’ll see federal intervention. If our policies come from a place of care, I don’t think the federal ones will. We have to figure out how to turn the tide without causing significant harm to our young people,” he said.

The vote on the expanded curfew bill was unanimous. 

Pretrial detention expansion continues, but not permanently

If there was a spirited debate this week in the council around criminal justice, it had to do with pretrial detention — specifically, a bill that would make permanent the expansion of pretrial detention for violent offenses that the council originally approved during the 2023 crime spike.

Proponents of the measure – including Mayor Bowser and Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto – say the bill gives judges more power to ensure that people charged with specific violent crimes are held pending trial, thus ensuring that they can’t be a danger to their communities. 

But critics have said that data commissioned by the council itself found the link between pretrial detention and public safety to be inconclusive, and some lawmakers have worried they are flying blind into a policy that will see more people remain behind bars before even being convicted.

So the council hedged somewhat – the expansion of pretrial detention will not be permanent, but rather continue until the end of 2026, so that more data on its efficacy can be gathered. “We should be getting the data to understand whether our policies work or don’t work,” said At-Large Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie, who proposed the change to the bill.

Cell phones are banned in schools … well, kind of

For at least thousands of D.C. students returning to school in August, a stern new edict will greet them at the door: No more cell phones. But for thousands more, well, no such rule will apply — at least not yet.

This week, the council gave final approval to a bill that largely bans cell phones in schools. We say “largely” because, like D.C.’s patchwork of traditional public and public charter schools (they each educate roughly half of the city’s 100,000 kids), the implementation of the new ban will be a little all over the place over the next school year.

When Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto initially introduced the bill in January, she proposed a citywide cell phone ban for as early as the 2025-2026 school year. That drew some concerns from dozens of D.C.’s charter schools, all of which would have to develop mechanisms to actually enforce a ban. The Office of the State Superintendent of Education proposed a year-long delay, but Pinto and other lawmakers expressed hesitation over waiting to move forward on a policy they said is critical to helping students stay focused and on track while in school. 

In early June, DC Public Schools, which already allows individual schools to impose bans or restrictions of their own, jumped ahead of the council and announced it would start enforcing a bell-to-bell prohibition on cell phones in the coming school year. The council’s bill, though, didn’t change, and merely calls for OSSE to develop a model policy that could be implemented by charters by the start of the 2026 school year. And to move ahead more quickly, the council bill now doesn’t include funding that OSSE said it needs to enforce the citywide ban when it takes effect.

“I am concerned that we’re rolling out a policy that our state education agency won’t monitor, and to me, that suggests it will be a policy on paper only, which is essentially our cell phone policy in schools now,” said a frustrated Ward 5 Councilmember Zachary Parker, who voted against the bill.