Nearly two weeks after protests swelled across the country in response to the death of George Floyd and police violence in Black communities, Dover's restrictive curfew remains in place. And yet, even in Minneapolis, the epicenter of the unrest, residents have been without a curfew for nearly a week.
Curfews cannot be enacted to thwart free speech, nor can they continue when there is no true emergency.
Dover officials can maintain public safety without a curfew--as cities across Delaware and the nation are doing now. We call on Mayor Christiansen to halt Dover’s curfew and instead focus on transforming the policies in his community that are contributing to the harm of Black and Brown people disproportionately.
Thank you to Adam Windett at Hopkins & Windett, LLC, who sent a letter to Mayor Christiansen on June 11, 2020 asking him to rescind the curfew. In his letter, Adam said "At a time when the nation is standing up in peaceful demonstration, not just against police brutality and misconduct but also in opposition to the breadth of police power and discriminatory exercise of police discretion, it is an affront to citizens of this community to strip the people of their rights to freedom of movement, speech, assembly, and liberty while providing law enforcement with unlimited discretion to stop, detain, search, and charge citizens with a violation of the law."
