What if they started a curfew and nobody knew?
The city of Concord is rescinding a nightly curfew it had apparently ordered earlier this week after residents complained they hadn’t been told about it in the first place.
After days of protests across the Bay Area and the country sparked when a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd by pinning his knee against his neck for almost nine minutes, cities and counties began imposing curfews earlier this week in an effort to prevent the nighttime looting that followed peaceful demonstrations.
Most of the local curfews were lifted by Thursday afternoon, but Concord officials put out a message that evening on the city and police department’s Facebook pages reminding people that a curfew implemented Tuesday was still in effect.
“On Tuesday, June 2, 2020, the City of Concord proclaimed a local emergency and issued a curfew order,” the post said. “The curfew was formed in response to the unpredictable nature of the civil unrest in the region. The curfew requires that people stay indoors from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. and will remain in effect until Monday, June 8, 2020. This order applies only to the City of Concord. Earlier today, Contra Costa County lifted its curfew.”
But many residents noted in posts on those pages that they had not been told about a city curfew at the outset.
“Why was the city’s order never announced on Tuesday?” one commenter asked. “This is first I’m hearing of an order in Concord.”
The city’s Facebook response to that comment was: “The City of Concord issued its curfew very shortly after the County issued its curfew on June 2. The timing of their curfew (8 p.m. to 5 a.m.) was consistent with ours. Therefore, we thought it best to communicate the County’s curfew so that it could have greater reach to those in our community who do not live within our city limits. We apologize for the confusion and frustration. All of this is being done to keep our residents and businesses safe.”
When this news organization on Friday morning sent emails to City Manager Valerie Barone and city spokeswoman Jennifer Ortega asking about the curfew, Ortega replied that the curfew was being rescinded on Friday, effective immediately.
A subsequent statement Ortega issued on behalf of the city said “the volatile situation in neighboring cities over the last week led Concord to declare a local state of emergency to provide City leaders with greater operational flexibility.”
The declaration also made the city eligible for FEMA reimbursements to cover expenses such as police support.
“We believe that having a curfew as part of this emergency order is no longer necessary,” the statement continues. “We did not communicate this information clearly to our community at the beginning of the week, and we apologize for the confusion and frustration this has caused.”
While there had been some instances of looting and vandalism in nearby Walnut Creek and other Bay Area cities earlier in the week, there were no widely reported instances of that happening in Concord.
A memo for a “peaceful solidarity protest” in support of the Black Lives Matter movement set for Saturday afternoon in Concord’s Todos Santos Park was circulated on Thursday.
The American Civil Liberties Union has criticized local governments for hastily enacting citywide or countywide curfews.
“The slew of hastily announced ‘curfews’ enacted in cities across California lack clarity as to their scope and duration. This is the wrong way to handle disruptions to what have been otherwise peaceful protests, and they are far broader than necessary to address any problems that have arisen or may arise,” reads a statement by the ACLU of Northern California. “Moreover, by making presence on public streets anywhere in these cities unlawful, these measures give police too much discretion over whom to arrest and will lead to selective and biased enforcement and risk harassment of people who are unhoused. In short, these measures will only repeat the very problems that our communities are protesting.”
