Phil Scott/Eyewitness News
Lebanon - It's the headline again in The Lebanon Reporter. The story describes the arrests of teenage drinkers in Boone County. This is the fourth time in ten days the paper has run a story about teens and/or adults violating the state's liquor laws.
In light of that, there is talk about this: a county-wide curfew.
Eyewitness News spoke with some teens at Memorial Park in Lebanon, asking what they think of a curfew.
"Bad. I don't like it. Bad. Very bad," said one teen.
"Certain people have certain things they like to do at certain times," said another teen. "So I think we should have the freedom to do that."
As might be expected, the feeling on the curfew matter was pretty much universally negative. The teens will hang out at the park until it closes at 11:00 p.m. The kids will stay later if the cops forget to come by and kick them out.
But Boone County Sheriff Ken Campbell says he's been under pressure for months. "When I ran for sheriff in 2006 I did a lot of surveys and visited with literally thousands of people around Boone County and this is something (the curfew idea) they brought to me."
Sheriff Campbell predicts vandalism and underage drinking will drop once a curfew is in place. And he wants to model that proposal on what he views as a successful curfew in neighboring Marion County where officers carry out curfew sweeps, not just issuing fines, but holding some teens until their parents pick them up. And even sending repeat offenders to juvenile detention.
Whether this will work in smaller communities isn't clear to the residents of Boone County. A recent Internet survey showed results which were pretty evenly divided.
Greta Sanderson is the Publisher of The Lebanon Reporter. She explained that division. "There's a lot of people that say 'kids will be kids.' And others say the parents are enabling. Or parents don't know what their kids are doing. That seems to be pretty consistent with what we're hearing."
If it's approved in the next month, Boone County's curfew could start with the new school year. That would make this summer, depending on your viewpoint, the last summer of fun and freedom, or the last summer of some youth out of control.
