"Teen" takeovers blamed on Covid and lack of libraries

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The mayhem over Memorial Day weekend in Chicago erupted without warning.

On Sunday, hundreds of teenagers descended on a housing project on the West Side. Five Chicago officers trying to disperse the crowd sustained minor injuries when they were hit by a car.

On Monday, hundreds more teenagers showed up at a beach on the South Side, and clashes erupted when police tried to get them to leave, resulting in 53 arrests and nine weapons’ being confiscated, WGN-TV reported.

Both were examples of a phenomenon that has been sweeping the country for months, which frustrated law enforcement officials call teen takeovers.

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Teenagers behaving badly in groups is hardly a new thing, experts said. But social media has made it easier to rapidly mobilize this generation of teenagers, who may be craving social interaction and looking for an outlet after having spent their formative years isolated during the Covid pandemic.

“If you are a teen today, you grew up, or you came of age, during Covid, when you were locked down,” said Samuel Abrams, a teacher and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

“Your social space is a screen; you are lonely; you are probably a little depressed,” he said. “You are not as physically active as you need to be, and you are desperate for human interaction and social contact. And you know when there’s a chance to gather and be part of something larger, we see teens flock to it.”

Many of today’s teenagers went into lockdowns during middle school, when kids are supposed to be learning how to socialize and interact with the world around them, Abrams said.

“That’s what these teen takeovers really represent to me,” Abrams said. “They’re not random violence. It’s not out-of-control youth.”

“More often than not, it is a desperate need for connection,” he said.

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In addition, Abrams said, teen takeovers swell up fast because many teenagers just have no place else to go. There used to be more of what experts call “third spaces” — not home or school — where kids could socialize freely. But spaces that are affordable and welcoming to teenagers are increasingly harder to find, Abrams said.

Take the library, he said.

“We always see plenty of room for senior citizens, plenty of room for adults and programming for adults,” Abrams said. “We see lots of space for little kids. ... We don’t see as much room for 11-, 12-, 13-year-olds or 16-year-olds.”

Jasmin Ford, a psychiatric nurse practitioner and clinical instructor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said teenagers today face a mental health crisis that accelerated during the pandemic and has not returned to pre-Covid levels.

There is also an element of arrested development for many young people who missed milestones in their childhoods because of the pandemic, Ford said. And the results of that may not be fully understood for another 10 or 20 years.

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