NYC Curfew to begin earlier at 8:00 pm on Tuesday, June 2, Says Mayor de Blasio

Tonight, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio stated that the previously announced curfew would begin a few hours earlier on the second day of its initiation. The announcement came during the Mayor’s telephone appearance on ‘Live on NY1’ news show with Cheryl Wills

This would come hours after the first announcement was made by the Mayor and NY Governor Andrew Cuomo. That declaration had set the curfew as taking place from 11:00 pm tonight to 5:00 am in the morning. All due to the numerous riots, looting and violence which has taken place in New York City over the past days. Something which came as an offshoot of the protests in honor of George Floyd who died at the hands of Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin.

It would appear that the decision to extend the curfew comes after looting continued within Manhattan and elsewhere in the hours prior to today’s onset of the curfew.

Below is a short part of the transcript as it pertains to this subject:

Mayor: Okay. Let me tell you about that and then let me tell you about my plans for tomorrow, because I have an update for you. But first, I’ll say, the idea of the curfew is to make clear that we are exempting essential workers, we are exempting anyone involved in emergency professions, anyone who’s going to the hospital, anything like that. But we want every-day New Yorkers who are not involved in essential emergency work to stay home from 11:00 PM on. The message to our police out in communities around New York City is, if you see someone out on the street that’s not doing anything harmful, you know, you can check on them if you need to, but the real goal here is to focus on a very few people who are trying to do harm, who are trying to damage property, trying to steal things – we’ve seen that for the first time last night in any meaningful way. We’re seeing it again tonight. It’s unacceptable, Cheryl. I want to be really clear. It is not acceptable in this city for people to break into stores, break store windows. This has not been something we’ve seen in New York City historically. I know we’ve seen it a lot around the country in the last few days, and in previous years we’ve seen this kind of thing around the country, but not here. So, the curfew is very clear that we will not tolerate any criminal activity, anybody breaking into stores, looting, smashing store windows, and that will give the officers from 11:00 PM on the ability to say to anyone’s on the street you have to leave immediately. And if they need to arrest, they will arrest.

But, Cheryl, I want to announce, in light of what we’ve seen tonight – I’m up in Midtown now and I’m in the area – hold on one second, just getting out of the way of one of the police vehicles – going over towards Madison Avenue, there’s been a lot of stores hit in that area and it’s really not acceptable. So, I want to announce now – I’ve spoken with Commissioner Shea and we’ve decided there should be a curfew again tomorrow night and we want to extend that curfew beginning tomorrow night at 8:00 PM. So, in other words, this current curfew will start at 11:00 PM tonight, go to 5:00 AM tomorrow morning, then curfew will resume at 8:00 PM on Tuesday evening and go again until 5:00 AM Wednesday. And we’re going to add an additional measure to stop this kind of activity from happening.

Wills: Okay. So, I just want to make sure we got that right. So, the curfew will be in place again tomorrow starting at 8:00 PM. Why is it three hours earlier tomorrow?

Mayor: So, the Governor and I spoke this morning and we made a decision on 11:00 PM because, except for a few hours last night, we had not seen any of this kind of activity of large-scale breaking into stores – again, not something we’ve historically seen in New York City – and we wanted to give people time to get home, we wanted to bring it in in a manner that certainly did not disrupt people in communities, and that we thought would be an effective tool. Obviously, brought a huge number of additional police officers into the places where we had had trouble. But I just have to be honest with you, you know, the strategy made sense. We all agreed on it. You know, the Governor, Dermot, Shea and I, we all agreed. But it’s just, we’re seeing too much of this activity tonight. So, the idea of going to 8:00 PM is it’s still light out. And that’s really what we saw this evening and last night, is when it got dark is when people attempted to do this kind of activity. So, we’re going to just take the next obvious steps and have a curfew that begins while it’s still light out at 8:00 PM tomorrow.