Get out of the street and go home. Chill, put down your signs. Tomorrow’s another day. That’s what dozens of American cities, counties and even states told their citizens after violence and protests flared in cities across America in the wake of the killing of George Floyd on May 25.
In Long Beach, which doesn’t exactly appreciate having LA or LA County (of which Long Beach is, of course a big part) telling it what to do, curfew has been confusing, and the overly cautious resident would want to just stay home rather than run afoul of whatever the local order of the day is.
The first curfew in Long Beach came Sunday after looting began and was set for 8 p.m. until 5 a.m. Monday.
Subsequent days brought further curfews, seemingly determined by spinning the hands of a clock: Monday’s curfew called for the city’s many and varied business districts to close at 1 p.m. (not doing anything to make things run smoothly was the fact that the alert regarding the 1 p.m. went out at 1:29 p.m., turning a lot of business workers and shoppers into instant scofflaws) and for people to be at home by 4 p.m. and stay there until 5 a.m. while LA County’s curfew began at 6 p.m. and ended at 6 a.m.
Tuesday’s curfew was 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.
A Wednesday curfew was set for 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. in Long Beach, as well as LA County, where another bit of confusion occurred when LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva announced he was practicing his own frontier brand of justice by declaring his officers wouldn’t enforce the curfew until 10 p.m., though the LAPD would enforce the 9 p.m. curfew. How you conducted yourself depended, apparently, on whether you considered yourself county folk or city slicker.
And these curfews just added to the fact that many residents were advised to stay home on more or less a 24-hour curfew because of the coronavirus.
Finally, on Thursday, there is no curfew in Long Beach, or in LA city and county, so there’s no more confusion in that area. Feel free to enjoy yourself and go out and do some shopping or grab a bite to eat, if you can find a place that isn’t boarded up, and you continue to observe social distancing. The events of last weekend did nothing to affect COVID-19, except perhaps to exacerbate the problem because of the noticeable number of protesters packed together without masks.
