The last time Sacramento was under citywide curfew? Apparently never

The citywide curfew announced Monday by Mayor Darrell Steinberg appears to be the first in Sacramento’s modern history.

Nick Piontek, an archivist at the Sacramento History Museum, said he couldn’t find any record of a curfew that covered the entire city. A check of The Sacramento Bee’s historical archives turned up empty as well.

But the city was temporarily placed under martial law, during its Gold Rush infancy, after a gunfight between property owners and “squatters,” in what became known as the “Squatters Riot,” according to Bill George of the Sacramento Historical Society. Martial law was declared for two days in 1850 and troops were dispatched to the city from Benicia.

And there have been selective curfews as well.

In February 1942 a 9 p.m. curfew took effect across Northern California for Americans of Japanese, German and Italian descent. A month later, the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans got underway.

More recently, the city of Sacramento in 2011 began enforcing an 11 p.m. curfew in an effort to remove Occupy Sacramento protesters from Cesar E. Chavez Plaza. The decision was challenged in court by civil liberties lawyers, but in July 2012 a federal judge sided with the city.

Steinberg announced the curfew to respond to two consecutive nights of violence after largely peaceful protests over the in-custody death of Floyd George in Minneapolis.

This story was originally published June 1, 2020 at 3:40 PM.