Mayor Johnson makes the case against downtown curfew on the eve of City Council showdown

Mayor Brandon Johnson Tuesday his defended efforts to safeguard downtown Chicago from unsupervised youths summoned by social media, saying his administration successfully fended off two of three teen takeovers last weekend.

Downtown Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd) plans to use a parliamentary maneuver at Wednesday’s City Council meeting to force a vote on his stalled proposal to roll back Chicago’s 10 p.m. curfew to 8 p.m. for unaccompanied minors in the downtown area.

Hopkins said Johnson’s mantra about “investing in people” has become a “meaningless cliché” and a mayoral “cop-out,” particularly after a tourist was shot last month while walking with her son outside a Streeterville movie theater that has become a hot bed for unruly groups of teens.

"We have to be proactive in finding effective tools to stop these events once they start happening. Otherwise, the next time a 14-year-old shoots a 15-year-old, it'll be a fatal shooting," Hopkins said Tuesday.

The curfew ordinance has been bottled up in the Council’s Rules Committee since Hopkins introduced it last summer. A two-thirds vote by 34 alderpersons is needed to suspend the rules and bring any matter that has not been approved in committee to the Council floor for a final vote.

Asked whether he has the votes, Hopkins said, “Possibly…I’m still in conversation with several of my colleagues.”

“All I can say for sure is the issue of the curfew will be brought before the City Council," Hopkins said.

If Johnson has his way, there will be no showdown vote.

The mayor used a portion of his weekly City Hall news conference to make the case against an earlier downtown curfew that would only “push the challenges elsewhere.”

The mayor released a so-called “Youth Impact Report” that documented all of the investments the city has made to employ, train, educate and constructively engage young people in neighborhoods across the city.

Johnson further noted that there were “three promotional flyers of teen trends set to take place” last weekend — in Millennium Park, at the corner of Ogden and Damen and in Hyde Park — but only one of those takeovers actually happened.

‘’Through the hard work of community-based organizations, street outreach workers and our Chicago police officers, we were able to prevent two of them from occurring,” Johnson said.

“The Hyde Park gathering did [happen]. So we deployed our Crisis Prevention Response unit to the location and ensured that CPD had significant resources to handle that situation.”

In 2022, 16-year-old Seandrell Holliday was shot to death near Millennium Park. The fatal shooting prompted then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot to restrict teen access to Millennium Park and convince a divided City Council to roll back the curfew from 11 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Johnson campaigned on a promise to lift the Millennium Park weekend ban on unaccompanied minors. But he has yet to do so.

During Tuesday’s news conference, Garien Gatewood, Johnson's deputy mayor of community safety, refused to confirm or deny reports that people who had arranged for a ride-share to the downtown area were blocked off by a map that said, "no rides downtown.“ He would only say that city officials “try to explore every avenue” to prevent teen takeovers.

“There are times where we look at geo-fencing (to) change some of the traffic and foot traction downtown,” Gatewood said.

“Especially if we know there’s going to be a teen trend, a lot of the work that we do ahead of time is to try to eliminate those. I think we actually eliminate a lot more than are covered. So, let’s say there’s 10 planned. We typically knock nine of them out. Sometimes 10.”

Johnson openly acknowledged that large groups of young people — or partygoers of all ages, for that matter — can be “intimidating and fearful.”

“I know that feeling personally,” the mayor said.

But Johnson added, “Diverting the problem elsewhere does not reflect my values…That is not what I believe the people of Chicago want as relief — just so long as it doesn’t happen over here. Our approach is to make sure that it doesn’t happen anywhere.”

The mayor said Hopkins is “bright” and his “heart is in the right place.” But “I want to do what’s best for the entire city.”