Like Chicago and many other American cities, Baltimore has been grappling with “teen takeovers” becoming violent.
In the summer of 2023, city leaders were under pressure after repeated teen gatherings downtown led to fights, assaults and other disorder around the Inner Harbor, while a mass shooting at Baltimore’s annual Brooklyn Day celebration that left two people dead and 28 wounded intensified concerns about keeping young people safe.
City officials brainstormed and came up with a plan. It included relying on violence-interruption teams of school staffers and volunteers from community groups to patrol downtown and limiting police interaction with teenagers.
“We saw a notable decrease in violence and crime in and around our downtown and Inner Harbor in the months that we have staff out there,” says Stefanie Mavronis, director of the Baltimore mayor’s office of neighborhood safety and engagement.
By the end of that summer, the number of youth-involved homicides dropped by 83% over the previous summer, according to Baltimore city data.
As Chicago struggles to find ways to rein in teen gatherings that become chaotic and violent, it can look to places like Baltimore for innovative approaches. Experts say a strategy that broadens summer activity choices and job opportunities can be far more effective than an over-reliance on law enforcement and punitive action.
The challenge these large gatherings pose revolves around how to create safe spaces for teenagers in crime-ravaged neighborhoods to get together while also ensuring that so-called “teen trends” that become violent don’t cast a pall on downtown commerce and tourism.
“Socially disadvantaged kids live in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty,” says Sara Thomas, a research assistant professor in Northwestern University’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. “They have to stay home to avoid violence. They don’t have opportunities. That gets pretty frustrating.
“We are seeing a concerning lack of spaces where kids on the South and West sides can gather,” Thomas says. “My guess is that some of these kids — if they don’t think they’re going to grow up — [figure], ‘Why not try this risky thing?’ A bad idea that gets thrown out on TikTok suddenly becomes a good idea.”
Here’s what other cities dealing with teen takeovers, also known as teen trends, are doing.
In Baltimore, keeping teens ‘safe,’ ‘engaged’
Baltimore has steered clear of an expanded youth curfew in favor of its “twofold strategy” that pairs a neighborhood safety and engagement office and more late-night activities for teens.
The city’s 25-week safety strategy over the summer includes violence-interrupters who patrol downtown on weekends. The teams include school staff members, volunteers and community organizations “who work with our young people,” Mavronis says. Baltimore has prioritized limiting police interactions with teens.
“Our No. 1 priority is keeping them safe, keeping them engaged and making sure at the end of the night everyone’s getting home safely,” Mavronis says.
The strategy was launched in 2023 and expanded last year. It’s working, according to Mavronis.
This spring, Baltimore officials learned through social media that a teen takeover was planned at the Inner Harbor. Before the advertised start time, outreach workers were there, talking with arriving teens.
Those interactions are designed to go beyond crowd control. Outreach workers ask young people whether they have a safe way home, whether they need help finding jobs, mental health services or other support at home.
“Sometimes, they’re surprised to see us,” Mavronis says of teens who encounter outreach workers during gatherings. “But we’re also not just engaging them. We’re connecting them with resources.”
In Detroit: parental responsibility, safe spaces
Detroit has added youth programming and ramped up curfew enforcement.
Unlike in Chicago, Detroit recently enacted a parental responsibility ordinance that fines parents $250 if their children are out after curfew and disruptive or violent.
And Mayor Mary Sheffield’s “Occupy the Summer” initiative offers free recreation, sports, arts programming and other organized activities to give teenagers safe places to spend their evenings and weekends. The goal is to make structured opportunities available before young people turn to social media-organized gatherings.
Detroit has paired that investment with a renewed emphasis on curfew enforcement and parental responsibility. Police detain juveniles found violating the city’s curfew and issue citations to parents if their children are out past curfew and involved in disruptive or violent behavior.
The curfew change, enacted last summer, carries a $250 fine, with subsequent violations subject to higher penalties. That’s an increase from the previous $75 first-time fine.
D.C.’s get-tough approach
Newly appointed U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, a former judge, prosecutor and Fox News commentator, has increased enforcement of the district’s curfew law to prosecute parents who “facilitate, enable or knowingly permit” children to engage in “delinquent acts.”
Washington, D.C., recently expanded its curfew to include 17-year-olds and weekend nights. It also now allows the district’s police chief to declare extended curfew zones in public areas where young people are gathered.
District leaders say the changes were prompted by repeated large youth gatherings that disrupted downtown neighborhoods, transit stations and commercial corridors and that the police needed greater flexibility to intervene before crowds became violent.
Juvenile justice advocates, including the ACLU of DC, have criticized the approach, arguing that curfews and prosecutions disproportionately affect Black teenagers. It says curfews do little to address why young people gather and that the city should invest more heavily in youth programs, mental health services and other community-based supports.
In Philly, a community center
In April 2023, a so-called flash mob in Philadelphia wreaked havoc. That resulted in a move to require teens under 18 to be accompanied by an adult after 2 p.m. at major shopping malls. Like Chicago, Philadelphia has a curfew of 10 p.m. for teens under 18. But the turn-in time for kids 13 and under is 9:30 p.m.
A nonprofit organization in Philadelphia offers an evening community resource center from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. for teens to avoid curfew violations. The center stays open until 2 a.m. for “police curfew handoffs.”
Philadelphia’s mass transit system, SEPTA, restricts the use of student discounted fare cards to school days between 5:30 a.m. and 8 p.m. In May, it began a crackdown on student-involved fare evasion that cost the system $11 million a year, also making it more difficult for teens to congregate in large groups downtown.
Chicago’s experience
Chicago’s struggles with large gatherings of teens began after 2011 along North Michigan Avenue. Then-police Supt. Garry McCarthy moved to safeguard the Magnificent Mile from groups he called “flash mobs.”
The hard-nosed approach got support from then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel — and it worked.
The pandemic denied teens access to the social interactions that young people crave. Today, they have fewer public places to gather safely without getting in trouble. News coverage of disruptive teen gatherings that intimidate older adults has led to restrictions at the public places where young people love to gather.
Memorial Day weekend in Chicago was marred by two teen takeovers that turned violent. On the Near West Side, a car veered into five Chicago police officers, who were injured as they tried to disperse an unruly crowd. A bigger crowd swamped the 57th Street Beach in Hyde Park, spilling onto DuSable Lake Shore Drive.
Afterward, Mayor Brandon Johnson said that throwing the book at young people and their parents isn’t the answer to unruly teen gatherings.
Former Philadelphia police Chief Charles Ramsey says the “permissiveness” of politicians like Johnson is partly why destructive and sometimes violent teen trends seem to be getting worse.
“People are afraid to do anything,” says Ramsey, a onetime deputy police superintendent in Chicago. “They want to complain about it. But they don’t want to do anything. That includes some elected officials. They’re afraid they’re going to piss off the base . . . . We want to give everybody a break and be too soft on everything, and we’re losing it as a society.”
Ramsey says he isn’t saying “send people to Alcatraz.” But he says “there needs to be some consequences” for teens and parents who look the other way — “even if it’s probation where a kid is not able to go out after a certain hour or associate with other kids known to be involved” in trouble.
“The parent needs to take some action against their own child,” Ramsey says. “Don’t let them go on the internet for a period of time. Take away the cellphone.”
Thomas says the COVID-19 pandemic and school closings it triggered had a profound effect on young people whose still-developing brains she likened to a “car with a sensitive gas pedal and faulty brakes.”
They’re “inclined to take big risks when there are apparent social rewards” like approval of friends, even if those friends are “endorsing a bad idea,” she says.
Young people are hungry for safe alternatives in their own neighborhoods so they don’t have to go Downtown to meet people, Thomas says. They also need jobs that give them skills, a sense of accomplishment and a chance to earn money, she says.
Though news coverage of teen gatherings has made some adults wary, Thomas says: “The more we treat kids as scary, the scarier they’re going to get. . . . These are kids. I’ve spoken to them about gun violence and their motivations to carry guns. Every one of them didn’t want to carry guns. They only carry them because they’re scared.”
Taking a cue from Baltimore
Vaughn Bryant, vice president and executive director of Metropolitan Peace Initiatives, says his community violence intervention network has formed a crisis-prevention unit that includes 20 people on call to assist the Chicago Police Department.
Their biggest concern is teens and young adults who “come to trends to settle disputes and instigate conflicts,” some involving gangs. All it takes is “two to four people in conflict” for things to “go awry,” Bryant says.
“CPD started calling us to send CVI workers to large Downtown gatherings,” says Bryant, whose network of organizations has $9 million in yearly contracts with the city. “Often, there are multiple trends on the same weekend. We go to ones that are potentially larger and at risk of violence. We engage with youth [that] we get to know and de-escalate any conflicts we see. We figure out where they’re from and what their interests are. If there are fights, and we see they have a weapon, we make sure they leave the scene.”
Bryant says there are dozens of success stories as police get better at monitoring social media and knowing who the organizers are. A recent example was a teen gathering at Foster Avenue Beach. City Hall found out about it in advance and closed several exit and entrance ramps on North DuSable Lake Shore Drive. It worked. Teens assembled without incident.
Emmanuel Andre, Johnson’s deputy mayor for community safety, says to ensure teens have access to Chicago beaches, city and police officials meet twice a week to talk about teen trends.
Johnson has resisted get-tough efforts in favor of providing more summer jobs and recreational opportunities.
He recently persuaded the YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago to offer free summer memberships to those 12 to 18 years old.
“We can hold young people accountable,” Johnson said the day the YMCA announced the summer program. “They want to be held accountable. But if you do not provide opportunity for young people, then you are rejecting young people.”
The financial crisis that the city is facing limits their ability to bankroll constructive alternatives for young people. Business and philanthropic organizations have stepped in, but those groups have limits.
That’s why Andre thinks Chicago will continue to struggle with teen gatherings in a way previous generations never did.
“Young people have a way of making noise and wanting to be seen and heard now in different ways,” Andre says. “We have to do all we can to listen and respond accordingly while making sure we take a layered approach to keeping people safe.”