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Kenyan McDuffie stood<\/span> in a dark suit and gingham tie in front of an infamous Chipotle in Southeast Washington, D.C. The day before, a video of teenagers fighting inside the fast-casual restaurant had gone viral \u2014 and presented the former city councilmember a political opportunity in his mayoral campaign.<\/p>\n His opponent, city council and Democratic Socialists of America member Janeese Lewis George, was \u201csitting on her hands and playing politics\u201d by opposing a police-enforced curfew for minors, McDuffie said. <\/p>\n So-called \u201cteen takeovers,\u201d or large, coordinated meetups of teenagers in public spaces, have become a key political cause in D.C., where McDuffie argues the city needs to crack down to stave off the worst excesses of the federal government. His critics say he\u2019s falling into a rhetorical trap laid by the Trump administration.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cWhen teen takeovers threaten the safety of residents and the young people themselves,\u201d wrote McDuffie in a letter<\/a> to the city council, \u201cthe Council cannot afford to leave law enforcement and communities without every appropriate tool at their disposal.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Last summer, before the federal takeover of D.C., McDuffie and Lewis George both voted in favor<\/a> of broad emergency curfew powers that allowed Mayor Muriel Bowser to\u00a0create targeted zones that youth could not enter after certain hours, enforced by local police. D.C. has long had limited curfew laws on the books, and an update to the city\u2019s permanent curfew law with new restrictions on enforcement is set to go into effect mid-July.<\/p>\n The candidates, who will face off in a Democratic primary to replace Bowser on Tuesday, have since split. Lewis George voted against both<\/a> extending the emergency and implementing the new permanent law, while McDuffie, though no longer on the council, said he supported both.\u00a0<\/p>\n To some, the scene at the Chipotle represented lawlessness and amplified their fears around the city\u2019s youth. To others, the incident, which police told local media<\/a> caused no injuries or damage, failed to warrant curfew policies which would increase arrests and police harassment of teenagers, primarily Black teens.\u00a0<\/p>\n The neighborhood around the Chipotle is beautiful, said Alex Dodds, \u201cdesigned as a space where people should come and gather.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cWhen Black children do that, they are seen as criminals,\u201d said Dodds, campaign director for Free DC, an organization advocating for the city\u2019s sovereignty that has endorsed Lewis George. \u201cI don\u2019t even understand what we want children to do.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n A few miles away from McDuffie\u2019s Chipotle press conference, Jeanine Pirro, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, struck an eerily similar chord to the candidate.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cTeen takeovers\u2026have terrorized our neighborhoods,\u201d said the former Fox News host. \u201cThey have shut down businesses, and they have wasted hard-earned tax dollars of law-abiding residents who just want to live and work in peace.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Federal law enforcement officials would soon begin a \u201csummer surge,\u201d targeting teenagers, Pirro warned. She added that her office would begin \u201caggressively prosecuting parents\u201d whose children violated curfew laws, threatening them with up to six months in prison.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n McDuffie has weaponized<\/span> the teen gatherings in campaign advertisements<\/a> and public comments to argue that strict curfew zones<\/a> \u2014 and the tough-on-crime mayoral candidate pushing them \u2014 will help forestall more aggressive actions of the Trump administration.<\/p>\n But advocates for D.C. sovereignty and youth in the criminal justice system warned that his rhetoric would only legitimize the administration\u2019s efforts to incarcerate D.C. youth on a large scale, and that there is no evidence that teen curfews reduce violent crime<\/a>. Instead, they would increase the rates of arrest and harassment, particularly for Black teens, at a time when the city is swarming with federal agents.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cKenyan McDuffie is much more buying into the Trump administration\u2019s playbook of lock-them-up and using fear to gain support,\u201d said Dodds. \u201cIt\u2019s so frustrating for our elected leaders\u2026to obey in advance and go out of their way to press for a youth curfew.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump personally weighed in<\/a> on the race on Thursday, threatening to \u201ctake back Washington, run it on the federal basis,\u201d if Lewis George were elected.<\/p>\n The theory in favor of juvenile curfews is that if you deter teens from gathering, they\u2019ll have fewer opportunities to commit crime. But that relies on a misconception, said Riya Saha Shah, executive officer of the Juvenile Justice Law Center.<\/p>\n \u201cSocial science research has shown us that [curfews] are actually not effective at reducing crime or victimization,\u201d said Shah. \u201cIt could result in increased crime or displaced crime in different places or at different hours of the day.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In 2015, research<\/a> on juvenile curfews in D.C. found that they actually increased rates of gun violence among youth. Researchers theorized that the emptier streets that resulted from curfew policies could make \u201cremaining offenders more comfortable opening fire.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n While juvenile curfews do not reduce crime, Shah said, they do increase run-ins with police, particularly for Black and brown children. A 2011 study found that African American youth were 269 percent more likely<\/a> to be arrested for violating curfew laws than white juveniles. The laws can also end up criminalizing teenagers for being unhoused, and an estimated 10,000 children<\/a> in D.C.\u00a0 experience housing insecurity or homelessness every year.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThey may be brought into a system by virtue simply that they don\u2019t have the ability to go home,\u201d Shah said.<\/p>\n In D.C., where nearly 20 federal agencies<\/a> have been deployed, the risks for teens of these types of curfews are immense. \u201cThere are so many different kinds of law enforcement all over the city now,\u201d said Shah. \u201cIt really increases the likelihood that children will be arrested.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere are so many different kinds of law enforcement all over the city now. It really increases the likelihood that children will be arrested.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n In his letter to the city council<\/a> urging extended youth curfews, McDuffie argued that they were necessary to protect \u201cHome Rule,\u201d the 1970s law that gave Washington, D.C. relative independence from the federal government.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cPresident Donald Trump has deployed the National Guard on D.C. streets and floated proposals to try 14-year-olds as adults. Every week that this Council allows curfew authority to lapse, it hands the White House and its allies fresh evidence for that narrative and justification for federal intervention,\u201d he wrote.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lewis George, by contrast, has emphasized that her primary objection to the curfew extension is the intense presence of federal law enforcement in the city.<\/p>\n Despite the lack<\/span> of evidence to support the impact of teen curfews on violent crime rates, the policy is overwhelmingly popular with D.C voters. A Washington Post-Schar School poll found that 71 percent of voters<\/a> supported imposing curfews in certain parts of the city at night. <\/p>\n Though her current position is unpopular, Lewis George has continued to surge in the polls, leading <\/a>McDuffie by 11 points in the same poll. Internal numbers shared with The Intercept have her up further.\u00a0<\/p>\n But Lewis George has not done as well as her opponent with Black voters, a key constituency in the capital sometimes known as Chocolate City. In the Washington Post-Schar School poll<\/a>, she trailed McDuffie by five points with Black voters. A spokesperson for the campaign said that Lewis George was proud of the multiracial coalition she had built, and argued that she does best in the most racially diverse areas of the city.\u00a0<\/p>\n The relationship between race and power is complicated in Washington D.C. Rapid gentrification has pushed out much of the city\u2019s Black population, displacing an estimated 20,000<\/a> between 2000 and 2013. Between 2000 and 2020 Black residents went from being 59 percent<\/a> of the population to 41 percent<\/a>. And yet, the city\u2019s political leadership has largely remained Black \u2014 it\u2019s had a Black mayor since Home Rule was established.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s an element of disappointment with the Democrats in the city.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Kurtis Hagans, chair of Metro DC DSA, which endorsed Lewis George, said it is understandable that people with long-standing ties to the city would be skeptical of someone promising change at the scale she is calling for. She has pledged to build 72,000 new homes<\/a> in five years to deal with the city\u2019s housing affordability crisis \u2014 double the goal set by both McDuffie and Bowser \u2014 called for stronger labor protections, promised to vigorously enforce wage theft laws, and vowed to establish a Federal Workforce Transition Center to retrain the thousands of federal workers who were laid off by the Trump administration.<\/p>\n Lewis George strongly outperforms with voters<\/a> 18-39, and she does the worst with voters 65 and older<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s an element of disappointment with the Democrats in the city, folks who have before promised big change and transformative change, and then have let them down,\u201d said Hagans, referencing previous mayors Vincent Gray and Adrian Fenty. \u201cI can imagine that\u2019s like, okay, well, at least we know Bowser.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n
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