ACLU demands Sacramento end curfew. City plans to keep it in place through weekend
The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday sent a letter to the Sacramento City Council claiming its nightly curfew is unconstitutional and demanding the city lift the order within 24 hours.
Similar letters prompted cities across California to lift their orders Thursday, but Sacramento officials are still planning to leave the 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew in place, at least through the weekend, if not longer.
“As other places are lifting their orders, Sacramento seems to be digging their feet in the ground,” said Abre’ Conner, a staff attorney for the ACLU of Northern California.
The curfew is in place until either the City Council or City Manager Howard Chan decide to lift it.
City officials enacted the curfew Monday in response to mass theft and destruction that occurred in downtown and midtown Saturday and Sunday nights after peaceful protests against police brutality had ended. Similar situations played out in cities across the country, prompting officials to quickly enact curfews to try to clear the streets so police could more easily arrest people who were stealing. But, the ACLU says it also gave police more ability to arrest and detain people and use force, exacerbating the very reason the protests started following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
The ACLU of Northern California sent similar letters Wednesday to the counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo and Napa, and the cities of Palo Alto and San Francisco, demanding they lift the curfew. Most of those localities lifted their curfews Thursday, along with the city and county of Los Angeles.
As of Thursday afternoon, city officials were still planning to leave the curfew in place at least through the weekend, Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg said.
“Some in the community believe the curfews should have been called earlier, some in the community believe the curfews are wrong and unnecessary,” Steinberg said in a statement Thursday afternoon. “I dislike the idea of curfews on principle, however we had and continue to have to make judgment calls about how to minimize the chance that more people get hurt or that anyone loses their life. I believe we have struck a reasonable balance in a most challenging situation.”
Sacramento’s resolution is especially problematic because while people traveling for work are exempt, it does not include a written exemption for the thousands of homeless people in the city, Conner said. That’s different than some of the other cities’ curfews, she said.
Even though the homeless are not a written exemption in the ordinance, they are exempt from the curfew, Steinberg said.
But verbal assurances are not enough for the vulnerable homeless population, Conner said.
That’s why the ACLU sent the letter on behalf of the Sacramento Regional Coalition To End Homelessness and James “Faygo” Clark, who is homeless and a longtime homeless activist, in addition to Black Lives Matter Sacramento, Conner said.
The causes align because black people are disproportionately represented in the county’s homeless population, Conner said.
While African Americans make up 13 percent of Sacramento County’s population, they make up 38 percent of the homeless population, a homeless count conducted in January 2019 found. Volunteers during that count estimated there are a total of 5,570 homeless people in the county, mostly in the city and mostly sleeping outdoors on any given night.
The ACLU also takes issue with the fact that the curfew order is citywide, not concentrated to areas that were hit with theft and vandalism, the letter says.
Sacramento police have so far arrested 68 people for violating the city’s curfew. Those arrests occurred Monday and Tuesday night, with no curfew arrests Wednesday night, police said. The city attorney’s office is deciding how to prosecute those violations. The arrestees could face fines up to $500, imprisonment of up to six months, or both.
Conner said the city attorney’s office should not prosecute them because the order “was unlawful since its inception.”
“These vague, open ended curfews are not only the wrong way of preventing violent offshoots from peaceful protests,” an ACLU news release said. “They further inflame the situation by giving police wide discretion to arrest and harass individuals exercising their first amendment rights – as well as the media documenting this historic moment. We are outraged by the tear gas, rubber bullets and other tactics that have been used against peaceful protesters and we stand in solidarity with them.”
Sacramento Police Department officers and Sacramento County sheriff’s deputies have been heavily utilizing those tactics this week, resulting in serious injuries. On Saturday night, A sheriff’s deputy fired a rubber bullet at a teenager’s face, breaking his jaw, he told the Sacramento Bee. The following night, a Sacramento police officer placed a teenager in a neck restraint early Monday morning. The Black Zebra Productions team, which The Bee has hired on a freelance basis to produce documentaries, was briefly detained by police even after displaying a Bee press pass.
This story was originally published June 4, 2020 at 5:03 PM.
