The Intercept81%
How Policing Teen Hangouts Became a Key Issue in D.C. Mayor's Race 25%
By Jessica Washington65%
6/12/2026, 9:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 34 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Hasty Generalization, and Post Hoc (False Cause), with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 28.7% saturation with 449 hits. Analysis detected 2,667 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,566 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 37.7% and a BS Rank of 25% (15,391 of 20,472 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 75.20% of the article peer group.
Kenyan McDuffie stood in a dark suit and gingham tie in front of an infamous Chipotle in Southeast Washington, D.C.
The day before, a video of teenagers fighting inside the fast-casual restaurant had gone viral — and presented the former city councilmember a political opportunity in his mayoral campaign.
His opponent, city council and Democratic Socialists of America member Janeese Lewis George, was “sitting on her hands and playing politics” by opposing a police-enforced curfew for minors, McDuffie said.
So-called “teen takeovers,” or large, coordinated meetups of teenagers in public spaces, have become a key political cause in D.C., where McDuffie argues the city needs to crack down to stave off the worst excesses of the federal government.
His critics say he’s falling into a rhetorical trap laid by the Trump administration.
“When teen takeovers threaten the safety of residents and the young people themselves,” wrote McDuffie in a letter to the city council, “the Council cannot afford to leave law enforcement and communities without every appropriate tool at their disposal.”
Last summer, before the federal takeover of D.C., McDuffie and Lewis George both voted in favor of broad emergency curfew powers that allowed Mayor Muriel Bowser to create targeted zones that youth could not enter after certain hours, enforced by local police.
D.C. has long had limited curfew laws on the books, and an update to the city’s permanent curfew law with new restrictions on enforcement is set to go into effect mid-July.
The candidates, who will face off in a Democratic primary to replace Bowser on Tuesday, have since split.
Lewis George voted against both extending the emergency and implementing the new permanent law, while McDuffie, though no longer on the council, said he supported both.
To some, the scene at the Chipotle represented lawlessness and amplified their fears around the city’s youth.
To others, the incident, which police told local media caused no injuries or damage, failed to warrant curfew policies which would increase arrests and police harassment of teenagers, primarily Black teens.
The neighborhood around the Chipotle is beautiful, said Alex Dodds, “designed as a space where people should come and gather.”
“When Black children do that, they are seen as criminals,” said Dodds, campaign director for Free DC, an organization advocating for the city's sovereignty that has endorsed Lewis George.
“I don’t even understand what we want children to do.”
A few miles away from McDuffie’s Chipotle press conference, Jeanine Pirro, U.S.
Attorney for the District of Columbia, struck an eerily similar chord to the candidate.
“Teen takeovers…have terrorized our neighborhoods,” said the former Fox News host.
“They have shut down businesses, and they have wasted hard-earned tax dollars of law-abiding residents who just want to live and work in peace.”
Federal law enforcement officials would soon begin a “summer surge,” targeting teenagers, Pirro warned.
She added that her office would begin “aggressively prosecuting parents” whose children violated curfew laws, threatening them with up to six months in prison.
McDuffie has weaponized the teen gatherings in campaign advertisements and public comments to argue that strict curfew zones — and the tough-on-crime mayoral candidate pushing them — will help forestall more aggressive actions of the Trump administration.
But advocates for D.C. sovereignty and youth in the criminal justice system warned that his rhetoric would only legitimize the administration’s efforts to incarcerate D.C. youth on a large scale, and that there is no evidence that teen curfews reduce violent crime.
Instead, they would increase the rates of arrest and harassment, particularly for Black teens, at a time when the city is swarming with federal agents.
“Kenyan McDuffie is much more buying into the Trump administration’s playbook of lock-them-up and using fear to gain support,” said Dodds.
“It’s so frustrating for our elected leaders…to obey in advance and go out of their way to press for a youth curfew.”
Trump personally weighed in on the race on Thursday, threatening to “take back Washington, run it on the federal basis,” if Lewis George were elected.
The theory in favor of juvenile curfews is that if you deter teens from gathering, they’ll have fewer opportunities to commit crime.
But that relies on a misconception, said Riya Saha Shah, executive officer of the Juvenile Justice Law Center.
“Social science research has shown us that [curfews] are actually not effective at reducing crime or victimization,” said Shah.
“It could result in increased crime or displaced crime in different places or at different hours of the day.”
In 2015, research on juvenile curfews in D.C. found that they actually increased rates of gun violence among youth.
Researchers theorized that the emptier streets that resulted from curfew policies could make “remaining offenders more comfortable opening fire.”
While juvenile curfews do not reduce crime, Shah said, they do increase run-ins with police, particularly for Black and brown children.
A 2011 study found that African American youth were 269 percent more likely to be arrested for violating curfew laws than white juveniles.
The laws can also end up criminalizing teenagers for being unhoused, and an estimated 10,000 children in D.C. experience housing insecurity or homelessness every year.
“They may be brought into a system by virtue simply that they don’t have the ability to go home,” Shah said.
In D.C., where nearly 20 federal agencies have been deployed, the risks for teens of these types of curfews are immense.
“There are so many different kinds of law enforcement all over the city now,” said Shah.
“It really increases the likelihood that children will be arrested.”
“There are so many different kinds of law enforcement all over the city now.
It really increases the likelihood that children will be arrested.”
In his letter to the city council urging extended youth curfews, McDuffie argued that they were necessary to protect “Home Rule,” the 1970s law that gave Washington, D.C. relative independence from the federal government.
“President Donald Trump has deployed the National Guard on D.C. streets and floated proposals to try 14-year-olds as adults.
Every week that this Council allows curfew authority to lapse, it hands the White House and its allies fresh evidence for that narrative and justification for federal intervention,” he wrote.
Lewis George, by contrast, has emphasized that her primary objection to the curfew extension is the intense presence of federal law enforcement in the city.
Despite the lack of evidence to support the impact of teen curfews on violent crime rates, the policy is overwhelmingly popular with D.C voters.
A Washington Post-Schar School poll found that 71 percent of voters supported imposing curfews in certain parts of the city at night.
Though her current position is unpopular, Lewis George has continued to surge in the polls, leading McDuffie by 11 points in the same poll.
Internal numbers shared with The Intercept have her up further.
But Lewis George has not done as well as her opponent with Black voters, a key constituency in the capital sometimes known as Chocolate City.
In the Washington Post-Schar School poll, she trailed McDuffie by five points with Black voters.
A spokesperson for the campaign said that Lewis George was proud of the multiracial coalition she had built, and argued that she does best in the most racially diverse areas of the city.
The relationship between race and power is complicated in Washington D.C.
Rapid gentrification has pushed out much of the city’s Black population, displacing an estimated 20,000 between 2000 and 2013.
Between 2000 and 2020 Black residents went from being 59 percent of the population to 41 percent.
And yet, the city’s political leadership has largely remained Black — it’s had a Black mayor since Home Rule was established.
“There’s an element of disappointment with the Democrats in the city.”
Kurtis Hagans, chair of Metro DC DSA, which endorsed Lewis George, said it is understandable that people with long-standing ties to the city would be skeptical of someone promising change at the scale she is calling for.
She has pledged to build 72,000 new homes in five years to deal with the city’s housing affordability crisis — double the goal set by both McDuffie and Bowser — called for stronger labor protections, promised to vigorously enforce wage theft laws, and vowed to establish a Federal Workforce Transition Center to retrain the thousands of federal workers who were laid off by the Trump administration.
Lewis George, who initially ran for her council seat on a platform of divesting from the police, is no stranger to attacks calling her “soft-on-crime.”
But for some it’s disappointing to see those same attacks coming from McDuffie, who had previously been largely aligned with Lewis George on issues of criminal justice.
McDuffie has taken progressive actions on policing in the past.
In 2020, amid heightened political energy around police brutality and broader calls to defund the police, McDuffie voted to pull $15 million from the Metropolitan Police Department’s budget.
And in 2021, he said that “we need to redirect funding away from the police departments.”
Dodds said it concerned her that McDuffie’s campaign appeared to be capitalizing on D.C. residents’ fears.
She argued that's what the Trump administration wants.
“They very much want us to feel afraid of young people and of black children in ways that are inherently racist,” said Dodds, “because when we feel afraid, we fight each other instead of fighting for one another.”
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