Who's afraid of teen takeovers?

0:00Okay, today explains Sean Rameswaram here in Washington, D.C., where the biggest story over the weekend was the guy with the gun at the dinner with the president. Big crime. And we're going to talk more about that on the show tomorrow. But on the show today, we're going to talk about smaller crimes here in Washington. Have you heard about the teen takeovers? A ton of teenagers get together in a corner of the city on, say, a Saturday night. And there's good times, but also, inevitably, there's shenanigans. Police say nearly 200 young people were involved Saturday night. Two robberies were reported.

0:35Someone fired off gunshots in the air. If some of these kids need to spend a night or two in jail in order to feel that there are repercussions to their actions, then so be it. It's not just a D.C. thing, though. Teen takeovers have been happening in Detroit, Chicago, Jacksonville, Los Angeles. So on the show today, we're going to ask what's to be done when summer's around the corner and the kids just want to have fun, but also there's some petty larceny and property damage.

1:25Adobe Acrobat. Adobe Acrobat, your new foundation. Use PDF spaces to generate a presentation. Grab your docs, your permits, your moves. AI levels up your pitch, gets it in a groove. Choose a template with your timeless cool. Come on now, let's flex those tools. Drive, design, deliver, make it sing. AI builds the deck so you can build that thing. Do that, do that, do that with Acrobat. Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat. What do you think today explained this? I don't know. Jenny Gathright is a Washington Post reporter who writes about the nation's capital. We asked her how exactly a teen takeover happens in the first place.

2:18They're planned on social media, mostly. Instagram is what I'm told and what we see, flyers on Instagram. Flyers? Yeah, they're flyers on Instagram. You know, sometimes there will be like, join this group chat for the location or a location will be posted later. Large Instagram DM chains. So that's a lot of how this is organized. And, you know, there are some young people in the area who kind of fashion themselves up and coming promoters because of the way they're able to attract large crowds to their gatherings. All right. I'm pulling up one of these ads right now. I'm very excited to see what it looks like because, like, what are they advertising?

2:54Okay, so it looks first and foremost, it looks like it was made using AI.

3:02Okay, this first one I'm looking at says link up at U Street. There's like fire, cartoony fire in the top left and right corners and then an image of U Street, but also cartoony. 5 p.m. till whenever. Pull up and be hype. 100 emoji. Find your age link with the crew and get turned up music emoji, dance vibe and shake some ass. Good energy only if you ain't coming to turn up, stay home. OK, this doesn't necessarily sound chaotic or or like, I don't know. Illegal, but what happens at these takeovers that's troubling cities like D.C. so much? So what's brought the trouble for local officials like the mayor, the police chief, the D.C.

3:55council is that in some cases the takeovers have ended in some kind of violence. Before you knew it, there was 20 National Guards and a lot of MPD and Metro police that were out kind of pushing them to one way or kids were running one direction or another. Make no mistake. These teen takeovers are dangerous. They are violent and they end up in fighting assaults, robberies. Businesses are impacted. By the time they get into a large group at the Navy Yard or someplace else, there's already danger. There is no law against laudering. There is no law against congregating in different areas. The piece that I have to focus on is the violent behavior.

4:40There are some robberies, either young people robbing other young people who are around or stealing from cars. There was one case in March where one of the so-called takeovers ended in gunfire. No one was hit, but a teenager was arrested for firing shots. And so that is really what has brought up a lot of the concern for people like the mayor, the police chief, and the officials who are responsible for public safety in the city. The government can do its part. The police can do its part. Community can do its part. And families have to do their part to keep their young people safe and engaged. Hmm.

5:17So you went to one. Did you get the sense there that people were coming to like wreak havoc? Or did you get the sense that, you know, when you put this many teenagers together in one place, there's bound to be some shenanigans or something in between or what? Maybe it's something in between. I mean, it's hard to say, right, because teens are not a monolith. And so, you know, I spoke to young people who were older teens, 18, 19, who had come to the so-called takeover and who had been to several. And they said, you know, they were not there for drama. They were not there to try to cause violence.

5:53They were genuinely there to try to meet other people their age and have a good time. Young people don't get together like this because you got the clubs, 21 up, man. You know what I'm saying? The adults can go out and have fun on the weekends and enjoy themselves. So what we do is we get everybody to come together, try to get everybody to come together and enjoy themselves, you know what I'm saying, have a little fun, get outside, you know what I'm saying. Basically you get a new community. Long story short, like you create new bonds with new people, like the person I was just with. I didn't know him at first, but now we, that's like my brother.

6:25So it's like you can't just be on your phone making new friends or thinking you making friends with people your age. which whole time it could be somebody older. This way we connecting with each other in person without no screens. Like, we having fun, having a blast. You know, they described some of the violence as unacceptable, but in some cases maybe inevitable when you have such a large group of people that maybe there will be a few who will act up or some people who come with some kind of intent to cause trouble. Drama everywhere, you know what I'm saying? You can't avoid the drama. Best way to do it is stay out of trouble, you know what I'm saying?

6:57A lot of people don't like a lot of people. Regardless where there is, there's always going to be some type of drama, some type of conflict. Try to trust in the young people to try to handle it a certain way because it has been a couple of takeovers where there was violence or about to be violence and it was stopped in its tracks. Which makes it a complex issue to deal with from the city's standpoint, right? Because kids want to get together on the weekend since, I don't know, the dawn of time. but if you put a lot of kids together on the weekend, something might happen. How is the city responding?

7:30Yeah, so the city has responded in a few ways. One of the major and most publicized responses has been this curfew policy. And so what we saw that was very successful when we implemented the curfew over the last year was that parents got the message. It's a tool for parents, too. The parents can say, you can't go there because there's a curfew. The city, at the urging of Mayor Bowser and a couple council members, has put in place a policy where young people under the age of 18 are forbidden from gathering in groups of more than eight in certain designated places that the police chief can choose and set a temporary, more intense curfew zone in advance of what they see as a planned takeover, right?

8:13So if the police chief sees one of these flyers and gets the sense that young people are slated to gather in Navy Yard, they will often declare a special curfew zone in Navy Yard. That forbids teens from gathering in groups and gives police the ability to disperse them if the clock hits eight and there are more than eight young people in that space. Does the curfew actually work? Because when I speak to teenagers in my neighborhood about this curfew, most of them say they're just going to violate it. Yeah, I mean, it's been really challenging to measure. I'm not sure that I have a way of measuring what would have happened if not for the curfew.

8:50The curfew, I'm not going to lie, there's no point in having a curfew for real for it because they're going to stay out here anyway. Like, honestly, us being at Banner Curve, we weren't even going to stay here long. Eight o 'clock, everybody was leaving. But now since the police hear and interacting with certain kids and doing and saying certain stuff, it's making it more like, no, we are going to stay. No, we are going to do this. The mayor and the police chief insist that it's been a useful tool and say that these gatherings would get more out of hand if they weren't able to disperse them earlier in the night or break them up.

9:20But there are some curfew detractors who argue that it kind of has created this tense space in Navy Yard around the curfew where young people repeatedly return. There's also something else going on here, right, to address this teen takeover thing. It isn't just curfew and more law enforcement and stricter policies. It's also like, let's give them something else to do. Yeah. So one thing that D.C.'s government has done is the Department of Parks and Recreation has been throwing and they've been doing this for a little while. I mean, they did a lot of this last summer as well with a series called Late Night Hype, where they kept the public pools open later and allowed teams to hang out there.

9:59Were there flyers? They did. They did make flyers for Late Night Hype. Actually, it was called Late Night Drip at the pools. That's what it was called. Late Night Drip. I mean, I think it was a smart name. And then they had teen spring jams on the weekends that bookended spring break. Where at rec centers, they hosted events with music, dancing, games, sports. And they actually said across two weekends, 6 ,000 teens attended the events. Okay. And, you know, a lot of people gave them a lot of praise for those events. I mean, there were some fights outside the events on the outskirts that, you know, led to some headlines about arrests of young people.

10:40There were definitely some issues surrounding them. But there was a lot of positive feedback from the teens who attended the events and also from a lot of youth advocates who've been really critical of the city's curfew, but who pointed to the events as something good the city was doing to kind of create that space that teens had been asking for, which was basically a later night option where they could be around a lot of other people their age and also feel safe. This feels like something that really gets at people's core philosophies about criminal justice, about adolescence. I've seen people sharing videos of these teen takeovers in Navy Yard in D.C.

11:24and saying stuff like, Wow, such an impossible issue to deal with. What's the city going to do? And then someone will respond, I know what they can do. Throw every one of these kids in jail. It ends up feeling much bigger than D.C. It feels like a sort of philosophical question about what to do about kids wilding out. Yeah, I mean, I think it cuts across a lot of different issues that get at people's emotions. It gets at issues of public space, issues of race, issues of class, issues of sort of who has the right to occupy space in a city, and also issues about policing, the role of police in a city and the role of police with young people, and then also public safety and fear.

12:09I mean, a lot of what's motivating the mayor here is that she's worried that something really bad might happen at one of these. And of course, if something bad happened at one of these, people would be looking at her like, should you have done more? Another thing that occurs to me is that all the teen takeovers that have been happening this spring in D.C. were happening in the spring. But we're like a month away from all these kids having nothing to do all day. Well, the mayor would push back strongly against nothing to do all day. I mean, her Department of Parks and Recreation has been advertising its slate of events and, you know, all that they're doing with programming.

12:44But yes, we are headed towards summer, which is, again, part of what's animating the debate and the tension around this. And, you know, some of the calls for, you know, more coordination and actual conversation about kind of what should be done next and how people, teens, adults, parents, government officials, business owners can all kind of get on the same page about what's the right approach here. And no clear answers yet. No clear answers yet.

13:19We're going to try and get some clarity when we're back on Today Explained.

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17:17You're listening to Today Explains. Is it Today Explain or Che Explains? Explain Duh. Explain Duh. When I see these videos of these teen takeovers, which aren't happening terribly far from where I live in Washington, D.C., I'm kind of thinking like, okay, this does look a little hectic. It does feel kind of new because so many of these kids are streaming it from the takeover. Some of these kids are there because of social media. But then I also think this kind of feels like West Side Story, the original. Hey, you! Give me one good reason for not dragging you down to the station house. Or the Steven Spielberg remake.

17:55We ain't no delinquents. We're misunderstood. We asked Thaddeus Johnson what he makes of them. He's a former cop and a professor of criminal justice at Georgia State University. So, you know, I think about, first of all, I think about, you know, my grandma, right? Nothing's new under the sun, right? Things may take different versions. They may have different mechanisms or what have you. But it's pretty much, in principle, very similar. And, you know, and I think, you know, when it comes to juvenile crime, think about terms like super offenders. They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called super predators.

18:35No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way. But first, we have to bring them to heel. There's a moral panic for some reason around juveniles. I came out to walk the neighborhood just to see what was going on. And they are hiding in the bushes, barking at me. They're being kids. They are doing 40 miles an hour. I'm crossing the street by my goddamn dog. These little pieces of shit. And whether people want to say it's racialized or ageism involved, when you have a group of unsupervised kids who are being unruly, you think about juvenile crime. It's something that's a little bit more shocking to the system.

19:16So I think, you know, many times, you know, juvenile involved crime is actually we're a little bit more fearful of that because they're so much more risk taking. They're so much more impulsive. They think it's not fully developed. They can be a little bit more dangerous because their rationale is different. I think there is has been a longtime fear of juvenile offenders and crime in general that, you know, we shouldn't minimize or either sensationalize. And of course, because these are minors, cities, law enforcement can deal with them in a specific way, a specific tool they have, which they wouldn't have if these were adults, which is curfew laws.

19:54Do curfews work? Let me say, you know, oftentimes, and I have to be, you know, keep a balanced perspective. Oftentimes when I see people just immediately going to curfews, and not just curfews, but any other reaction to everything we see from our leaders in D.C. and all over, you know, some could say that perhaps that's lazy governments are taking the easy way out when it comes to governing these things, right, and not doing the harder work. But think about it. Part of the thing as a mayor is maintaining order. Right. And so perhaps even though we don't see that it reduces crime. Right. Perhaps that we see because the fact that it doesn't have any long term effects on keeping juveniles or communities safe.

20:33Right. There's no real strong evidence that's showing that. But if you kind of read the TV, as you think about if I'm a citizen and I saw what happened in the Navy yard, right, as a mayor, I cannot afford to do nothing. So I can see it as a temporary, almost as a symbolic way of governing and maintaining order, but we shouldn't lean into it and rely on it. So with juveniles, the best thing is prevention, right? And we can't expect that we're going to have 100 percent effectiveness in reforms or things that we do. It's also a suite of things and not one thing. So mind you, juvenile crime is a small portion of all of our all crime, right?

21:10So we can't afford to throw every resource and means at it. And it's also unfair to ask police to police us out of this, right? Just like it's unfair to also throw it all on the parents, right? You know, these kids are our kids. And so first of all, I will work through trying to change that thinking. So you need to have things like the Safe Passage program, which in some of our preliminary work, we found that it works. When it comes to safe passage, we want to make sure that those kids that are 18 years and under get to and from school in a safe manner. We have identified target hotspots in the community where a lot of the kids seem to conjugate and get into disputes.

21:45So we strategically place workers there to help motivate the kids to go home safely, make sure they get on the buses, make sure that they don't have any disputes or fights at the bus stops in those local hotspots. We're going to speak to them. We're going to make sure they're all right. You want to make sure that their well-being is paramount to them getting home. What we found is that it shows that it appears to keep juveniles safer. Particularly, we know that juvenile crime doesn't happen in their home neighborhoods. And so, first of all, we have to stop treating it like it's just a home community thing or where they live.

22:16It's about where they go. It's also providing activities for them and not things like midnight basketball because there's selection effect. The kids that were not going to get in trouble anyway are going to be the kids going to be at midnight basketball. The troublemakers are going to come there and make trouble or go somewhere else. So we can't just lean on it. But things like jobs and maybe expanding juvenile jobs beyond the summer. Right. This is a capitalistic society. And it really sucks not to have an economic identity. You have to help them get on a path in that way and treat them like people, but also understand that you all are still developing and need guidance.

22:52And so we have to make sure that we provide a village around these kids. and we have carrots and sticks, hold them accountable, but also give them a path out. And we just can't view this as a parent problem because they're treated as a bad parent or you don't care. You're probably struggling too. And so it's our responsibility to kind of help fill in those gaps. So enforce where enforcement needs to be at, but don't throw away the key. Let's find the beauty in salvaging lives and not destroying them. Okay. So concepts like prevention, mediation, alternatives, activities. We've heard all of this, you know, coming out of COVID when kids were wiling out.

23:31We've heard about it earlier in the show in terms of what DC is trying to do. What is it about this cocktail that works versus doesn't work? Because it sounds like stuff that is done. And yet here we have these teen takeovers and cities like DC seem a little paralyzed when it comes to solving it? Well, you have to kind of forecast. I mean, you stay in a reaction mode, right? And you have to also be realistic. Like, so having those events, I think y 'all had a few weekends ago after the takeover, they had like this family friendly event somewhere. Eight juveniles were arrested last night after several fights broke out.

24:10But picture this, all of the chaos happened at the same time. An event meant to provide a safe space for young people was underway. Crowds of kids waiting to get in, but several times fights broke out. Some teens wearing masks and hoodies jumped the gates and started fighting. And so one thing, we have to be realistic. And what is the realistic reduction in crime? Or what is the amount of crime that we expect as a benchmark before we can start considering where we go? So we have to have some real some real issues, but it also, I mean, conversations, but also it has to be coordinated. But enforcement, accountability, opportunity, support, centering the schools, centering the communities and the families, you know, the research shows that that stuff works.