Four reasons why local school districts ought to get out of the Big Brother role...

In a day of terror sleeper cells and wide open gang activity on our streets, school districts in California are living myopically again. They're getting involved in creating daytime curfews in our cities, making it illegal for any person under 18 to be out in public during school hours.

Regardless of the provisions to excuse students who are homeschooled or who are with their parents or out on legitimate school business, the laws result in field interrogations of law abiding students anyway, carried out by overburdened police. The results show no drop in truancy, but an increase in irritated parents, nervous kids, and subpoenaed city councils.

Here are four reasons why we ought to put this overreaching idea back into study hall:

1. Daytime curfews do not deter juvenile crime. The biggest argument of curfew fans is crime reduction. But the studies show there is no such reduction with the program.

2. Fourth amendment problems abound. We teach kids in class that citizen are protected against investigation without "probable cause". And then, if they're out of class a little early, we pull them into a police encounter that violates the whole principle.

3. Bad kids and good kids are both seen as guilty until proven innocent. This is not the encounter with authority we want kids to have. Police/youth relations will head south real fast. And lawsuits will be on the way. You can't imagine the "profiling" lawsuits we'll see.

4. Short legal lifespan. My attorney friends tell me that since states have truancy  laws on the books already, if cities put laws in place to replace existing laws, they commit "preemption". Basically, a city can't replace a state law with its own law. We might call this Gavin's Gaffe, since it's the same thing San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom got in trouble with when he tried to decide that his fair city could just ignore state marriage laws. Old Gavin got reversed  and then passed his legal cost onto his taxpayers. Cities in California face getting the same treatment . That means more scarce money heading to the attorneys instead of to the students.

All of which makes me suspect that it was the attorneys that gave the cities this stinker in the first place. Well, overuled, dudes.

Joe Pursch is heard nightly on AM 710 KFIA from 5-7PM PST, streamed live on the Internet at www.kfia.com . 

You can contact him at realtalk@kfia.com .