Trick-or-treaters over 14 in Chesapeake, Virginia can be charged with a misdemeanor. Norfolk, Suffolk, Portsmouth, and Virginia Beach nearby bar kids over 12 from trick-or-treating. Rayne, Louisiana, and Jacksonville, Illinois, also ban teenage trick-or-treaters. An ordinance in Belleville, Illinois, slaps insufficiently immature door bell-ringers with a $1,000 fine.
Morons. The same communities don’t punish juvenile adults who have spoiled the kids holiday by expropriating it. The theory these silly places have adopted is, we are told, that they are trying to reduce teenage crime. I believe there are already laws against teenage crime. Most of the same elected officials who are pushing these laws also wanted to force teens to wear masks not too long ago.
Moreover, the laws are obviously unenforceable. Police aren’t going to card trick-or-treaters. How would that go? “Wait here, kids, while I call 911”? It’s easier to give them some damn candy. How would wasting police time on Halloween patrol help reduce crime? Really, at a certain point of Deep Stupidity, a municipality should forfeit city status and be declared a commune. How do people this idiotic work, eat, breathe, and, God help us, reproduce?
The alien leader in “Plan 9 From Outer Space” has a trenchant word for them…
When I lived on Capital Hill in D.C. in a black neighborhood, some teens rang my bell on Halloween and asked for candy. They had no costumes. I said, “Come back in some kind of costume, and I’ll give you candy. That’s the deal.” They didn’t come back. If a high school student comes to my door tonight, is costumed and polite, I’ll give them some treats. A thirty-year-old? I’ll probably suggest that he needs to get help. But the government has no business sticking its big, ugly nose into how I choose to handle Halloween.
Ethics Alarms 
Come back with a costume?
I bet I can use that to harass some 5-year old princesses tonight.
-Jut
I went trick or treating until I was 15. Costumed, polite, and chaperoning my younger siblings and their friends. How does a situation like that work under these laws? Arrest the 15 year olds and leave the 10 year olds crying in the street? Unless the teens are actually causing trouble, who cares how old they are?
“Arrest the 15 year old and leave the 10 year olds crying in the street?”
Maybe
Police arrest a man for a warrant on lack of insurance. Leave 4 children (ages 1-14) alone in the car at 11 PM.
When my brother turned 5, he wore size 14 boys clothing. I still remember a ‘friend’ who came by my house asking me why does your brother act like a 5 year old? My answer because he is a five year old. You can’t always tell how old someone is by just looking at them.
Trick-or-treating is innocent fun, even for teens. All the kids of all ages were nice and polite and I was happy to give them candy and happy to let them just be a kid. Our upper middle class neighborhood is known as the place in our town for good candy (many of us set up tables in our driveways – we gave away a few hundred dollars worth). I would say most of the older kids looked like they came from the lower income areas of town (and often accompanied younger siblings). Those older kids were genuinely excited about the candy they got.
In many ways I’m glad not to have to deal with 17 year-old costume-less trick or treaters, now that I live in a condo. Though I would ask “what are you dressed as?” and every so often got the answer “myself.”
I like Larry David’s take:
Personally, I think once you hit 7th grade you are too old for trick or treating and should voluntarily walk away, although putting on a costume for a Halloween party is still all right. However, I do not think trick or treating is an offense that merits a hefty fine which most teenagers, especially in a situation that bars those 13 and 14 from trick or treating, would not be able to pay anyway. Now, if you want to impose a curfew the night before Halloween, popularly known as mischief night, saying everybody under 18 has to be off the street by sundown just for that night, you might have something. Too often it’s no longer about toilet papering houses or spraying shaving cream on windows, it’s about breaking windows and slashing tires.
I wonder if regional attitudes on teenage trick or treating correspond to regional trends in teenage crime rates. There is no mischief night where I live, and the teenagers here are mostly well behaved.
No “mischief night” here in Virginia, Maryland, D.C., or in my old stomping grounds in Greater Boston.
They come to my house, they get candy. We put several pieces of candy into sandwich bags and let the kids choose which bags they want. Last night was freezing with a few snow flurries here and there. We had kids bundled up in coats, some of them driven through the neighborhood by their parents. Everyone got candy, including the teenagers that showed up hurriedly at the end that had no costumes at all.
It was no issue for us. We’d bought loads of candy and, in the end, only 29 kids showed up.
Laws should be responsible, enforceable and reasonable. This one is none of the above.
We had an inch of snow on the ground and temps in the high 20sF in our central IL town for Halloween this year. Too cold for wearing costumes by themselves, although most kids who came to our house had costumes on under their parkas.