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Why teens in DC and elsewhere are staging “takeovers”

It’s 10 pm. Do you know where your children are?

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........

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