When defending the heavy focus on curfew sweeps in neighborhoods like City Heights, a tactic we’ve been exploring lately, proponents often say that most violent crime happens during curfew hours.
The community needs the sweeps, residents, police and politicians say, to physically remove kids from a dangerous environment so they won’t become victims or perpetrators of crime.
However, we crunched the numbers and, as the graphs above show, most juvenile crime in San Diego actually happens outside of curfew hours.
Contrary to proponents’ claims, the number of juvenile arrests have typically peaked around 10 a.m. and the number of juvenile victims of violent crime around 3 p.m. After those peaks, crime has tended to gradually fall until the early morning hours.