This spring, videos of teenagers gathering in massive crowds in Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, Jacksonville, and other cities have gone viral. In most of the videos, you’ll see hundreds, sometimes thousands, of young people gathered in open spaces or in the parking lots of restaurants and malls. Oftentimes, it can look chaotic. These gatherings have been dubbed “takeovers.”

Teens say they occupy these spaces because there aren’t enough places for them to be with their peers on the weekends and in the evenings.

“Young people get together like this because you got the clubs 21 and up, man,” Tyrone Crest, a 19-year-old DC-based content creator, told the Washington Post in audio shared with Vox. “The adults could go out and have fun on the weekends and enjoy themselves, right? So what we do is we basically try to get everybody to come together, enjoy themselves, you know what I’m saying? Have a little fun, get outside.”

Some teens also say the takeovers are a response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Ky’onna Hinton, 18, told the Post that “I feel as though we couldn’t really have as much fun as we do now. Because for me, Covid was in eighth grade, so my eighth-grade year, I was inside, and my ninth-grade year, I was inside. All the stuff that people used to do — having fun outside and parties — that got taken away from us. So we trying to live it up now.”

Some of these takeovers, though, have gotten violent. In Washington and other cities, teens have engaged in fights, robberies, and vandalism, and some young people have been arrested for gun possession. This has resulted in city leaders using curfews and police in an attempt to rein in these gatherings.

Jenny Gathright, who covers the DC government and city politics for the Washington Post, has been reporting on the takeovers in the region. She spoke with Today Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about the trend and what’s being done to address “takeovers” ahead of the summer, when teenagers may have more free time with no school.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

For people who don’t live in DC or a city where this stuff is happening, tell us: What is a teen takeover?

According to some of the teens I spoke with, a takeover — they call them “DMV takeovers” because it’s the DC, Maryland, Virginia region — is really just a massive gathering of young people in some kind of open space in the city. Sometimes these can be pretty rowdy, which is why they have led to a lot of concern and hand-wringing from local officials.

Why are they called takeovers?

Well, one of the young people said, “It’s because we’re taking over. We’re taking over a public space, and occupying it.” And it can sometimes feel to people who are in those spaces that it has suddenly become a teen space, because there are so many young people around.

This isn’t limited to Washington, DC. Is this happening elsewhere in the country?
Yes, it is. I’ve seen reports out of Chicago and LA where young people there have also been gathering in groups of hundreds in popular neighborhoods.

Who attends these takeovers? How are they planned? Is it like some schools get together and they share a day and location? Is it all social media?

They’re planned on social media, mostly. Instagram is what I’m told, and we see flyers on Instagram.

Flyers?!

Yeah, they’re flyers on Instagram. Sometimes there’ll be like, join this group chat for the location or location will be posted later. Large Instagram DM chains. 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 as up-and-coming promoters because of the way they’re able to attract large crowds to their gatherings.

Alright. I’m pulling up one of these ads right now. First and foremost, it looks like it was made using AI.

The one I’m looking at says “Link up at U Street.” There’s cartoony fire in the top left and right corners, and then an image of U Street, but also cartoony. “5:00 PM till whenever. Pull up and be hype, 100 emoji. Find yo’ 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.”

Okay. This doesn’t necessarily sound chaotic or illegal. What happens at these takeovers that’s troubling cities like DC so much?

What’s brought the trouble for local officials like the mayor, the police chief, the DC Council, is that in some cases the takeovers have ended in some kind of violence.

There are 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 the officials who are responsible for public safety in the city.

So you went to one. Did you get the sense that people were coming to wreak havoc, or did you get the sense that when you put this many teenagers together in one place, there’s bound to be some shenanigans?

It’s hard to say, because teens are not a monolith. I spoke to some young people who were older teens, 18 or 19, who had come to the so-called takeover and who had been to several, and they said they were not there for drama. They were not there to try to cause violence. They were genuinely there to try to meet other people their age and have a good time out in public space because they felt like they didn’t have very many places to do that.

They described some of the violence as unacceptable, but in some cases, maybe inevitable when you have such a large group of people — maybe there will be a few who will act up, or some people who come with some kind of intent to cause trouble.

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 the dawn of time. But if you put a lot of kids together on the weekends, something might happen. How’s the city responding?

The city has responded in a few ways.

One of the major and most publicized responses has been this curfew policy. The city, at the urging of Mayor [Muriel] Bowser and a couple of 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.

So if the police chief sees one of these flyers and gets the sense that young people are slated to gather in [the DC neighborhood of] 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 8 pm 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.

It’s been really challenging to measure. The mayor and the police chief insists 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. But there are some curfew detractors who argue that it 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? It isn’t just curfew and more law enforcement and stricter policies. It’s also, “Let’s give them something else to do.”

One thing that DC’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 — its series called Late Night Hype, where they kept the public pools open later and allowed teens to hang out there.

Were there fliers?

They did make fliers for Late Night Hype. It actually was called Late Night Drip at the Pools. That’s what it was called.

Late Night Drip. [chuckles]

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. They actually said that across two weekends, 6,000 teens attended the events.

A lot of people gave them a lot of praise for those events. There 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’d been really critical of the city’s curfew, but who pointed to the events as something good the city was doing to create the space that teens had been asking for — 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 adolescents.

I’ve seen people sharing videos of these teen takeovers in Navy Yard in DC and saying stuff like: “Wow, such an impossible issue to deal with. What’s the city going to do?” And then someone will respond: “Throw every one of these kids in jail.”

It ends up feeling much bigger than DC. It feels like a sort of philosophical question about what to do about kids wilding out.

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 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.

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 in DC were happening in the spring, but we’re like a month away from all these kids having nothing to do all day.

The mayor would push back strongly against having nothing to do all day. Her Department of Parks and Recreation has been advertising its slate of events and all that they’re doing with programming.

But yes, we are headed toward summer, which is part of what’s animating the debate and the tension around this — some of the calls for more coordination and actual conversation about what should be done next and how people 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.