The Scourge of Teen Takeovers

This past Memorial Day, more than 1,000 teens swarmed the blocks around Lake Michigan in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. A resident described the scene: “Hundreds of people were walking and running down our street, jumping on top of cars, twerking, smoking blunts.” One group twerked on the top of a city bus.

At about 9 pm, the Chicago Police Department closed Lake Shore Drive. As sirens wailed, the Hyde Park resident armed himself with bear spray to retrieve something from his car. An hour later, a gunman shot three teens a block from the resident’s home. The suspect remains at large, though police made 13 arrests for illegal gun possession, battery of an officer, and other felonies.

The previous day, an after-prom gathering in Chicago’s Little Italy neighborhood descended into mayhem. “It looked like a million kids out here,” one neighbor told WGN News. “They were acting like straight animals. Kids were all on top of cars. They were stopping in the middle of the street, twerking.” Fights involving pepper spray and other weapons were common. Cars sped through the crowds. Shortly before 3 am, a police commander formed skirmish lines. Three minutes later, a sedan veered into oncoming traffic and struck an officer. Moments afterward, it hit a second officer, crossed into another lane, accelerated, and plowed into three more cops. The rampage ended when the vehicle crashed into a police car and a utility pole. The 18-year-old driver was carrying a semiautomatic handgun with an extended magazine. An hour later, shots were fired in the area, but no arrests have been made.

These two incidents are just a few of the mass-disorder events this year that have been dubbed “teen takeovers.” Nationally, violent felonies overall are down, but disorder is not.

Teen takeovers come in two varieties: pedestrian and vehicular. Pedestrian takeovers feature hordes of youths on foot commandeering roadways, sidewalks, beaches, and malls. Vehicular takeovers, also known as sideshows, involve cars performing daredevil stunts at intersections, on freeways and bridges, and in parking lots. Vehicular sideshows originated in Oakland, California; they are distinct from Chicano lowrider culture. Spectating, inevitably accompanied by filming, is risky: a woman was killed by an out-of-control car in Los Angeles in 2022; this June, a man was fatally shot at a sideshow in a southwest Chicago mall parking lot.

The distinction between pedestrian and car takeovers is not absolute. Pedestrian takeovers attract reckless drivers. And vehicular takeovers sometimes end with participants rushing to the nearest convenience store, stripping the shelves, and assaulting the cashier.

Takeovers are organized on social media, with anonymous flyers summoning mass gatherings. The exact location may remain undisclosed until the last minute. The notices sometimes draw on gangster rap and Black Power imagery, featuring masked men and raised fists. Others are less ominous. A flyer for a teen “trend” (another label for the phenomenon) on a South Shore Chicago beach this spring called for “no drama” and showed a cartoon figure with its naked butt thrust out in twerking stance.

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Detroit had its own Memorial Day uprisings this year. At one, a 16-year-old was shot; at another, teens looted a gas station and a Family Dollar store. The previous weekend saw three uncontrolled gatherings in the city, including one where a 14-year-old was shot in the chest outside a Gucci store.

Unruly crowds descended on Arcadia Lake in Edmond, Oklahoma, on May 3. An 18-year-old girl was killed and 22 others injured in a burst of gunfire between rival gangs.

In Clearwater, Florida, a 17-year-old was shot at a beach occupied by hundreds of teens on May 31. Similar mobs descended on parks in Tampa and Orlando on April 25 and May 8. In Orlando, two deputies were injured trying to control the melee.

Washington, D.C.’s Navy Yard neighborhood, a gentrifying district of restaurants and small businesses adjacent to Nationals Park, has experienced a string of teen takeovers this year. On March 14, hundreds of black-clad teens surged through the streets, robbing passersby, fighting, and screaming. Businesses locked down; residents took cover. A 15-year-old fired several rounds, and police recovered two other guns. Additional outbreaks occurred on April 11 and May 16. In the May incident, brawling teens took over a Navy Yard Chipotle, hurling chairs while customers cowered.

Hundreds of masked teens commandeered a stretch of I-77 in Charlotte, North Carolina, on April 26, lighting fires with gasoline and launching rockets.

Hooded teens descended on a shopping mall in a northern suburb of Milwaukee on March 29, throwing punches and fleeing police. Houston’s Willowbrook Mall experienced a similar outbreak on April 25; a roller-skating rink on the city’s outskirts was taken over a week earlier.

Businesses in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, closed rather than risk injury to employees or damage to property during a takeover on May 19, the fifth such incident there since April. The Delaware State Police, the Department of Natural Resources, and police departments from Dewey Beach, Milford, Lewes, Bethany Beach, and Rehoboth Beach were needed to restore order.

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This is far from an exhaustive list of the 2026 takeovers. Explanations tend to converge on a single point: the teens themselves are not responsible for their actions.

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The teen takeovers are not about poverty or hunger. Nearly every participant carries a smartphone, making claims of material deprivation hard to sustain. Nearly all are amply supplied with the necessities of life, including food. Mass looting does not target the dairy or meat aisles of grocery stores. It does not seek blankets or warm socks. Convenience stores are plundered not because the looters are starving but because the stores stay open late and are poorly guarded.

The takeovers are not a reaction to a lack of “teen spaces”—not that cities are under any obligation to provide such spaces. City streets are as available to urban teens as to anyone else. True, the reputation of black juveniles precedes them, and a small but consequential contingent continues to reinforce that reputation. As long as black males, on average, commit crime at disproportionately high rates, the law-abiding of all races will be tempted to cross the street and the police will be on alert when large groups assemble. Of course, not all blacks are criminals; millions fervently support law and order and deserve protection in return. Whites commit heinous crimes and destroy public order. But when black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at nearly ten times the rate of white males in the same age cohort, as criminologist James Alan Fox has documented, it is rational to take precautions.

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It is taboo to acknowledge the racial demographics of the takeover phenomenon—until it becomes time to play the race card and blame whites for overreacting to supposedly imaginary black crime. Laurence Steinberg, an oft-quoted psychology professor at Temple University, mocks the “dog whistling” that occurs when black teens gather in large groups. The suggestion that “we should be afraid of them” is as ludicrous today as it was during the uproar over “wilding” and “super-predators” in the 1980s and 1990s, Steinberg told the New York Times in May.

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In May, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro announced that her office would pursue criminal charges against parents whose failure to supervise their children results in lawbreaking. Other jurisdictions have passed or are considering parental accountability laws. Enforcing those laws requires manpower to make and process arrests, however, and many police departments continue to suffer from post-Floyd attrition and de facto defunding.

Some efforts to crack down on takeovers have already been thwarted by blue-state politicians. After the May 19 takeover in Rehoboth Beach, police charged four Delaware State University students with facilitating a riot. The local NAACP chapter alleged racism, and on May 29 Delaware’s attorney general ordered the charges dropped.

Meanwhile, Democratic cities and states have rolled out summer-safety plans rich in promises of social services and tight-lipped about punishment. Maryland Governor Moore directed the state’s juvenile-justice and public-safety agencies to prioritize “support programs” and “prevention and intervention programs.” Chicago’s Summer Safety Strategy takes “teen voices seriously” and allows “communities to define their own healing,” Deputy Mayor for Community Safety Emmanuel Andre said at a May press conference. On June 17, the Chicago City Council rejected a proposal to require parents to pay a fine or perform community service if they knowingly permit their child to violate the law. Curfews remain hotly contested in blue jurisdictions; some cities allow them only if the authorities create a simultaneous “safe space.”

A natural experiment is being created to test the relative efficacy of government social programs versus law enforcement in curbing crime.

Teen takeovers are not a mystery. They are the predictable result of a culture that increasingly refuses to hold lawbreakers responsible for antisocial behavior, especially if those lawbreakers are black. Every institution that once imposed discipline—the family, the schools, the juvenile-justice system, the police, even public opinion—has been weakened. Despite elite hopes, government programs cannot substitute for the habits of self-control and respect for law that make civil society possible, however. Until those habits are restored, Americans should expect more takeovers and a widening divide between jurisdictions willing to enforce basic norms and those that are not.