Tulsa’s juvenile curfew could be extended by city council Wednesday, but the downtown community is conflicted on the logistics of it.
The curfew, implemented on June 26, prohibits unaccompanied minors from being downtown from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. Thursday through Saturday. Now, the council is set to vote on extending it through Oct. 26, 2026 —but only for Fridays and Saturdays.
Tulsa councilors approved the initial curfew after a violent Juneteenth weekend where at least seven people were shot and one was killed.
“I have a 17-year-old kid. I don’t want him hanging out downtown,” Mayor Monroe Nichols said days after the shooting, according to KOSU. “They shouldn’t be down there anyway. There’s no reason to be hanging outside of a bar that you’re not old enough to get in downtown Tulsa late at night. We’re going to cut that out.”
In the months since implementation, Council Chair Phil Lakin told The Eagle Thursday, “police continue to say to us, ‘Hey, look, this has been really effective for us.’”
Lakin said as part of the extension proposal, Tulsa police will provide quarterly updates on the amount of citations issued, crime statistics, demographics and police contacts made with minors.
Tulsa also has a citywide curfew which has been in place since 1995, restricting minors from being out from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. Sunday through Thursday, and from 12:01 a.m. until 6 a.m. on Friday and Saturday.
But some in the downtown business community think the solution should — and must — go beyond keeping kids and teens away at night.
“We need gun control. We have too much access to weapons, and it’s way too easy to do stuff like that these days,” Maxx Conn, a bartender at Blue Dome District sushi restaurant Yokozuna’s, said. “Can’t put all that on children. It’s adults too. Where are they getting weapons from?”
Even before the downtown curfew went into place, some businesses took matters into their own hands. Bailey Caygill, manager of The Brook Restaurant & Bar, told The Eagle they reduced hours in 2024 to avoid late night interactions with young people. It used to close at midnight, but it now closes at 10:30 p.m.
“This past summer wasn’t as bad as the summer before was,” Caygill said. “But I would say 2024 and 2023, those summers were pretty bad, just because we did have a lot of young kids kind of running around and doing whatever they wanted … throwing parties in the parking lot.”
While the curfew may be part of solving the crime problem, former mayoral candidate Casey Bradford said there has to be a next step.
“The curfew was to get the kids off their phones videoing violent crimes that are happening downtown, or being involved in violent crimes that were happening downtown,” Bradford told The Eagle, “so that way we could find a better solution on how to fix these issues going forward. Nobody provided a reasonable solution outside of the curfew.”
The council is scheduled to meet and consider the curfew extension at 5 p.m. Wednesday.
