What the city won’t tell you about Myrtle Beach’s new 9 p.m. curfew | Opinion
I’m all for knowing where your teenagers are at night. I have two.
But I don’t think curfews for kids under 18 are a great way to keep the general public safe or any way to curb teenage boredom that so often sets in at night during these hot summer months.
So after the Myrtle Beach City Council voted Tuesday to move a citywide midnight curfew to 9 p.m. in the downtown area and on city parks and property, I have to admit I am skeptical, especially so because the council had told the public ahead of the meeting that the curfew would actually start at 10 p.m., an hour later, and made no mention of extending it beyond downtown until just before its vote.
So much for getting the word out, which city officials now say they will do on social media, in PSAs, as far away as North Carolina, and using speakers at the boardwalk starting at 7 p.m.
The age-old question, of interest well beyond the boundaries of Myrtle Beach, is, of course, at what point do you take away rights and privileges of many because of the misdeeds of a few.
The rub is there have been several shootings along Ocean Boulevard in Myrtle Beach in recent weeks, and residents, police, politicians and the business community want people to be safe.
Two members of the public expressed misgivings about the curfew Tuesday. One supported it.
Before I get into my own misgivings, there are reasonable exceptions.
It will be OK for kids under 18 to break the curfew if they are with a parent or guardian, working, on a sidewalk outside their home, because of an emergency, at a recreational activity supervised by adults and sponsored by the city or a civic organization, or exercising their First Amendment rights.
I don’t know if we’ll see an uptick in 17-year-olds reciting the phrase “the right of the people peaceably to assemble,” but that would be great if so. I do, however, know there are better ways for police officers to keep the peace than by asking teenagers who may not and likely don’t have IDs how old they are.
“I’ve been down there since 1988,” curfew supporter and business owner Chris Walker said Tuesday. “A lot of things have changed, but just having brazen shootouts on our street, that’s not what I signed up for.
“This is my American dream,” he said. “I love this town. But extraordinary circumstances do take extraordinary measures to fix them. The 9 o’clock curfew, I think, is something we have to agree with down there. And we don’t do any of this lightly. We’re businesses, we have to make money. Before that, we have to make sure our customers and our employees are safe.”
Walker owns an ice cream store, two coffee shops, a haunted house and some parking lots in downtown Myrtle Beach. On weekends, he has four security guards at $27 an hour on patrol.
He also has 80 cameras and said they have recorded “things that you see on video games” by people who “have no respect for human life, and that’s the sad state of where we are right now.”
A quick recap:
An 18-year-old from Bennettsville fired a gun in a crowd several times, a nearby officer shot and killed him, and 11 people were injured on April 26. Two 18-year-olds from North Carolina, two juveniles and a fifth person were arrested after gunfire erupted in a crowd on June 12. And a 17-year-old who worked at the Peaches Corner restaurant shot and killed an 18-year-old there after an altercation on June 27.
Each incident was horrifying to read about it, and more horrifying to witness or experience, I’m sure. I’m all for any reasonable action that could keep one of South Carolina’s most popular destinations safe and inviting, and keep residents, visitors and all the people working in the area alive.
And I get that desperate times call for desperate measures, as Walker so eloquently told the council on Tuesday.
But I am also opposed to drastic government overreach that creates new problems rather than solving existing ones. And I think what Myrtle Beach has done is rash.
Here’s why — and why this is of interest well beyond Myrtle Beach to every city in South Carolina.
A lot of questions
With little public discussion, in a state where 17-year-olds can legally get unrestricted driving privileges, the City Council moved its longstanding, reasonable midnight curfew three hours earlier, to a time considered early not only by teenagers but by many of their parents.
And the council did this to address a series of shootings that involved either 18-year-olds or 17-year-olds working in the area, individuals to whom the more restrictive curfew would not apply.
Moreover, the council did this while agreeing to subject the parents and guardians of the young people who break the curfew to a potential separate violation whose punishment could be $500 or up to 30 days in jail. And the council did so while subjecting employees and business owners to the same potential penalty if a business knowingly lets young people break the curfew on its premises.
The council did all this with two votes, actually. The first vote Tuesday — to enact the new curfew permanently — requires another, final vote in two weeks. The second vote Tuesday declared the next two weekends “extraordinary events,” allowing the city manager to impose the curfew immediately. Apparently “extraordinary event” is another term for a weekend in Myrtle Beach.
Also worth discussing, since the City Council did not, is that the council did all this with a policy but without a full explanation and maybe even appreciation for the enforcement methods that would be involved when officers detain curfew violators. Before detaining anyone for breaking the curfew, police officers would need to determine how old they are, which can be tricky when teenagers don’t have driver licenses or other identification, and especially time-consuming.
Are officers going to approach crowds of people who look like they might be teenagers and demand ID? What if most of the young people don’t have it? Or can’t get a parent on the phone right away if an officer asks them to call an adult? Will the assumption be that they’re all under age?
The officers then will have to escort the detained young people to the police department. How long will that take them away from protecting public safety in the area and on the boulevard?
City officials said they will be hiring “civilian juvenile monitors” to watch over the kids whose parents or guardians live far away and could take an hour or more to come get them. That will free up officers to get back to the boulevard, perhaps to round up more teenagers. But how will these monitors be hired? At what cost? And how will they be screened so that parents know their kids are safe while they are being detained for being 17 years old on a public street?
Again, I get it. The April shooting on Ocean Boulevard merited a much quicker response than the abysmally slow way the mayor and the police chief responded days later to ease concerns. And successive shootings have only raised fears among those who visit or work along the boulevard. While business leaders are largely on board with the earlier curfew, even they say that far more needs to be done.
You know who agrees?
Researchers who have studied city curfews in other areas for decades.
This is what Kristin Henning, the director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic at Georgetown University’s Law School, told NPR in 2023: “Several studies across the country have shown that juvenile curfews are ineffective both at reducing crime and at reducing victimization. And we’ve known this for quite some time. Curfews have been experimented with pretty much since the ‘90s, and there has never been any robust research demonstrating their effectiveness. And quite to the contrary, in some cities, we’ve seen that, you know, crime has gone up instead of gone down, and so they aren’t effective.”
A societal issue
Curfews probably go back to the days (and nights) when cave children had to keep an eye out for dangers like hungry dinosaurs. Curfews have cropped up in Charleston, Greenville and Rock Hill, to name a few places.
The city of Charleston adopted a 9 p.m. curfew for anyone under 18 along King Street in June despite opposition from that city’s Human Affairs and Racial Conciliation Commission.
The city of Columbia, which has an 11 p.m. curfew in Five Points, considered a citywide curfew in response to youth violence just last year but did not adopt one.
That’s partly because curfews sometimes have the opposite effect of what is intended: They can build distrust between police and young people and lead to more problems. They also by definition give young people less to do rather than taking a holistic approach and giving them something else to do.
There’s also a more targeted approach to bad apples whose misbehavior leads adults to consider curfews in the first place: “solutions to address the individuals with a history of bad behavior instead of a blanket curfew.” That’s what Columbia’s city manager articulated last year.
Myrtle Beach has taken another tack, embracing a curfew and enlisting parents’ help — or else.
“I think one thing that is very clear with our ordinance is that parents should be responsible for their underage children,” Councilwoman Debbie Conner told one critic at Tuesday’s meeting.
Will it work? We’ll see. Hopefully, we’ll also see other tactics employed to reduce shootings.
But if the city of Myrtle Beach insists on an earlier curfew, I hope it also insists on sharing the number of juveniles it detains over time, especially on weekends. Juvenile court is closed to the public for appropriate reasons so there will be no way to track curfew violations.
The public deserves to get regular updates with general details about the number of curfew violations and what other charges young people are facing when they are detained after 9 p.m. It would be great if the council made such updates a regular part of all meetings this summer.
That would certainly help gauge the need and effectiveness of the curfew — and give other cities in South Carolina some hard data to mull over if they consider similar approaches to a societal issue.
This story was originally published July 9, 2025 at 5:00 AM with the headline "What the city won’t tell you about Myrtle Beach’s new 9 p.m. curfew | Opinion."