Why Do We Tolerate Violent "Teen Takeovers"?

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]Hey everyone, why are we putting up with this?

[00:00:12]>> I'm Rich Larry of National Review and that's video of a brawl at a Chipotle in the Navyyard section of Washington DC that went viral. And obviously this kind of incident has no place in orderly society. We shouldn't tolerate it and we don't have to tolerate it. We just need to pursue the right kind of tough-minded policies to stamp this kind of thing out. I'm going to describe what those are and how ridiculous the opposition is to the kind of measures that would stop this kind of thing from happening. Now, that video went viral. One, because obviously a crazy scene, right? It looks like a saloon fight staged in a Wild West movie. And also, we saw innocent bystanders cowering in a corner.

[00:01:04]>> Now, one of those bystanders was a father who just happened to be there with his kids cuz he'd taken them to a Nationals game. The Nationals ballpark is right there in the vicinity. saw the Orioles versus the Nationals ends up at this Chipotle and then this happens and he talked about just how harrowing it was.

[00:01:21]>> So at that point I tell the children, "Come on, get with me. Get up. Let's start backing up." And then it was like an ambush. My son said on the way home said, "Papa, the problem is I can't unsee that. Those individuals have now directly impacted my security, my life. Uh my children are now talking about like I never want to go to Chipotle again." Now, this kind of incident is very bad for innocent bystanders, as that clip brings home.

[00:01:47]It's also terrible. There are innocent bystanders as well, for the people working at that Chipoti who tend to be young kids who are minorities who are doing the right thing because they are showing up to do an honest day's work and they're subjected to this crazy scene. It's also, by the way, bad for the kids engaged in the brawl. They might hurt one another and obviously this kind of thing is the predicate for even worse criminality to come. So this simply can't be tolerated. But these kind of so-called teen takeovers, we're seeing them across the United States.

[00:02:21]We've seen them in Norfol, Virginia.

[00:02:23]We've seen them in Detroit. We've seen them in Chicago. And we've seen this takeovers in all sorts of other places as well. So if we return to Washington DC, how do we deal with this? Well, the US attorney down there, Janine Piro, former Fox News host, to her credit, is taking it very seriously and says she wants to prosecute parents involved in these kind of takeovers. Now, I appreciate that impulse, but as a practical matter, the overwhelming majority of these kids probably only have a mom at in their house, in their home, maybe a grandmother in their life as well. And they can't control these kids. I think in the majority of cases they would if they could, but they're not physically capable of it. There's no father in the home. So, I think threatening them and going after them is of limited utility. But there are all sorts of other practical, relatively easy measures we can take to stop this kind of activity. As Charles Layman of the Manhattan Institute points out, perhaps my favorite crime expert in the United States of America, by the way, all you need to do enforce a curfew. ban masks, prosecute juveniles as adults when they commit violent offenses, detain violent offenders pending trial, and use civil injunctions to shut down criminal groups. These kind of measures have been used before. They've worked other places. They need to be used now.

[00:03:43]But again, in Washington DC who have opposition to doing this sort of thing, including opposition to a curfew, a leading candidate for mayor down there, a socialist named Janice Lewis George.

[00:03:56]this is her rationale for opposing a curfew.

[00:04:00]>> You know, I I voted against uh the extended youth curfew uh because I actually went down an AVR um and uh as when you come up the escalator um what our young people are seeing, 10 yearear-old, 9year-olds, 12 year olds are seeing individuals with guns on them uh and they are uh questioning and enforcing the curfews on our young people. Here's the thing. A curfew is a tool and you got to determine when you use a tool whether it's the smartest thing to do in that moment. Right now we have federal law enforcement officers on our streets uh from various agencies.

[00:04:35]They are not trained in deescalation.

[00:04:38]They are not accountable to DC taxpayers and oversight of the council. And so the risk is a very real risk harm to our children. Harm that could result in death to our children. Now you're listening to that and she talks about these young kids, nine, 10 year olds, seeing individual with guns and it's with the implication it's a very bad thing and you think she's going to be talking about gang bangers or something.

[00:05:00]No, she's talking about law enforcement officers with guns. She is of the mindset that any interaction between law enforcement and teens is a bad thing.

[00:05:11]When the fact is the law enforcement does need to interact with certain segment of teenagers either to hustle them along, tell them to go home or to arrest and detain them if they are guilty of crimes and a threat to the rest of the community. Here's more, by the way, from Janice. As an executive, you have to decide which tools you use and when you use them. And right now, using the curfew as a tool for our young people is dangerous. It is dangerous because we have federal troops who are in our city.

[00:05:44]>> Again, the presumption there is that law enforcement is a threat to the community instead of these unruly, lawless individuals who threaten everyone else and prey on everyone else. The fact is in places like Washington DC, it's a very small minority of repeat offenders already known to authorities who drive the overwhelming majority of crime. If you can deter them, if you can detain them by focusing on them in particular, you make the rest of the community safer for everyone else. And this is a approach, by the way, that has had success now in places you wouldn't necessarily expect. San Francisco, for instance, used to be a watch word for chaos. Still not perfect, but has gotten much better by adopting common sense measures on crime. It used to be that car breakins were a huge endemic problem in San Francisco that were considered just an inevitability of urban life.

[00:06:41]Everyone thought you just can't do anything about this. You just have to accept it. It was called bipping. You break the window of the car and you grab whatever's inside. had the shards of glass on sidewalks and pavement they'd see all the time were called San Francisco diamonds. Residents of San Francisco put up signs in certain areas warning tourists, whatever you do, don't leave anything in your car because someone's going to break in and steal it. And lo and behold, San Francisco decided to do something about this. And actually has succeeded. 86% declined since 2023 in these car breakins. First three months of this year compared to the first three months of 2025, such breakins are down 50%. And what did cops do? They began to deter and detain the people committing this crime, these crimes. They'd set bait cars that looked like a very alluring target. Then when the thieves would break in, the cops would be right there. They'd arrest them. They use technology, cameras, drones to track the folks who are committing these sort of crimes. And they put a lot of them behind bars. And now San Francisco cars a lot safer than they used to be. What was the beginning of wisdom here? Well, in San Francisco and a lot of other juris like a lot of other jurisdictions around the country, it began with getting rid of their progressive prosecutor, an absurd guy named Chasa Bodin, ousted in 2022. They elected a new mayor with a better attitude towards crime who appointed a pretty good police chief. And it just shows if you arrest people, crime goes down. And you've seen a decline in all sorts of other offenses in San Francisco. Again, not perfect. Same thing is true of Baltimore. Baltimore had just four homicides this year, the lowest number since the current tracking began in 1970. Homicides over the last decade fallen. Robberies over the last decade fallen. What did Baltimore do? It got rid of a progressive prosecutor and then began to focus in a serious way on repeat offenders. And it's worked.

[00:08:39]Again, not a perfect place, but much better than it was. It's no longer the famously crimeridden city depicted in the great TV series The Wire. The big takeaway here is that order is not inevitable. It's not spontaneous. It needs to be insisted on and enforced and protected from what's usually a pretty small group of malfactors who will threaten it, who will blight certain areas, who will create a sense of chaos and engage in violence. it is within our power to stop them and we have to stop them. Now, it's certainly true that the overall crime trend in this country has been quite favorable for several years now. That's a fantastic thing, but it doesn't mean that we still don't have problems and it doesn't excuse places like Washington DC from actually doing what's necessary to stop this sort of chaos. Hey, do yourself a favor, comment, like, and subscribe. I guarantee you won't regret it. I'm Rich Lowry.