North Carolina city leaders responded to this summer’s “teen takeovers” with urgent calls for curfews and tougher enforcement as large, social-media-driven youth gatherings strained police departments and raised public safety concerns.
A month later, as those calls have moved closer to becoming enforceable ordinances, that urgency has given way to concerns about enforcement, civil liberties, and whether curfews would actually address the problem — even as large youth gatherings and youth-related violence have continued elsewhere in North Carolina.
The shift is most drastic in Raleigh, where the curfew push began after a chaotic July Fourth weekend, in which police estimated about 3,000 young people gathered at Brier Creek and more than 5,000 gathered in Glenwood South. Nine people were shot across Glenwood South, Brier Creek, and Capital Boulevard, and police reported 29 arrests…