Southlake, Texas, a small suburb of 24,000 uppity souls in the northwest corner of the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex, is becoming a dangerous place to live. Southlake is a pristine town that struggles to maintain its dignity and purity in the face of the multitudes oozing out from crowding neighbors.
A police blotter from February 8 describes these evildoings:
- 12 juveniles consuming at a party that had gotten too loud
- vandals shooting out a residential window
- vandals shooting out a vehicle’s windows
- 3 DWIs (all adults)
- two identity thefts
- theft of a stove (!) from a residence
- theft from a storage unit
- two construction thefts, including one arrest of an adult
That’s the sum total for one week of violence in Southlake. Obviously things are out of hand here. And the blotter doesn’t even mention the worst of it: the public nuisances presented by unruly teens at the local mall.
Local mall? Well, no, Southlake would never be so undignified as to allow a mall. (Southlake doesn’t even allow you to rent a tool from Home Depot. Apparently, town founders felt that residents shouldn’t fix their own houses, they should hire undocumented migrant workers.) Instead, Southlake features something called the Southlake Town Square—a ludicrous, Disneyland-ish attempt to re-create an old fashioned downtown area. The Town Square features places to work, shops (generally overpriced trendy crap, in my humble opinion), eateries, a movie theater, and, to the distress of many, a place to hang out for annoying hordes of middle school urchins.
An article today in the predictably leftist local rag talked about Southlake’s interest in cracking down on the hangers-out. The pubescent hordes are perceived as little more than a nuisance. They hang out in the book store, a roomy Barnes & Noble that stays open late. B&N is corrupting the souls of our youth! This must be stopped! A curfew is required! The police chief will petition the city council for an 11pm curfew for children under 17.
Never mind, of course, that there is no real crime problem, youth or otherwise, in Southlake. It’s kids being kids, being loud, and getting out of hand once in a while. The merchants should have the right to solve this problem on their own without a heavy-handed intervention and crackdown by local ordinances and flatfoots.
Oddly, no one views hundreds of kids in one place as a blessing and an opportunity. At least they have somewhere to go, somewhere that the watchful eyes of many adults keep them from getting into any real trouble. And they should represent a tremendous financial opportunity for someone–if you can’t make a buck sucking up the bored dollars of the overly pampered middle school and high school set, you’re not trying. Maybe the owners of Southlake Town Center should push out one more unnecessary Ann Taylor store in favor of an arcade.
A Southlake curfew will represent one wonderfully bad but typical example of the predominant modern use of government: as a force, to suppress behavior of others, behavior that you don’t happen to like. The affected teens can’t vote, so there’s no fear of resistance or reprisal. Of course, the bogus argument is always that it’s “for the safety of the kids,” and to help curb vandalism. We all know, though, that it’s about people who are tired up putting up with snotty, loud teenagers. But a curfew will only push the kids whose parents don’t care further into the shadows.
