“Teen takeovers!” everywhere! Still no evidence.
Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| June 2026
Media, politicians, and cops decry “hundreds” or “thousands” of violent, property destroying, rampaging (Black) teenagers. Yet, these “takeovers” appear nowhere in police reports.
I apologize for the sparsity of recent posts; I’m drafting a comprehensive journal article for peer review on the moronic depths to which the panic over teens and social media has sunk.
But made-up teen crises march on. Let’s begin with this weekend’s nationally headlined “heavy police response” on peaceful Long Island to a “teenage brawl” among 100 high school students gathered at Robert Moses State Park, according to the right-wing New York Post.
Wellll, not exactly. The Post’s own description of what it branded a “teenage brawl”: “Two teens fought in boxing gloves” in front of a “large crowd of onlookers.” How civilized (I guarantee no high school fistfights back in my ‘60s teenhood involved boxing gloves). It was basically the conventional “smoker” occurring in dozens of venues around New York City. Dumb kids. Their “undeveloped adolescent brains” should have known to hold bake sales to raise $150,000 to rent Madison Square Gardens.
“Teen takeovers” driven by “social media” remain the latest panic gripping officials and media reports. They’re blamed for apocalyptic social disruption, violence, vandalism, theft, shootings, and public disorder across dozens of cities and suburbs – even on -chester-famous Lon-Gisland.
May 2026 was a particularly bad month for feral youth mobbings. Teens (Black teens) by the hundreds and even thousands reportedly “rampaged” in Detroit, Columbus, Baltimore, Atlanta, Washington DC, Chicago, Milwaukee, all over Florida. Everywhere!
May 2026 police statistics will trickle in for months, but let’s look at the ages of persons arrested so far for criminal violent, property, drug, and public order offenses in the especially afflicted cities above where police report numbers:
Under age 20: 183
Age 20-29: 380
Age 30-39: 404
Age 40-49: 321
Age 50-59: 192
Age 60+: 141
All ages: 1,621
Source: FBI 2026.
When more May 2026 police stats are posted, I promised to relay them. Note that grownups, led by ages 30-39 but even extending to grayhaired 50-agers, are causing more crime than teens, even including 18-19-year-olds and children along with youths.
So far in May 2026, FBI statistics show persons under age 20 comprise 10% of all persons arrested for criminal offenses. That proportion is down from 11.1% in May 2025, 12.9% in May 2019, 23.1% in May 2010, and 24.7% in 1990.
Yes, in Millennial, Xer, and Boomer adolescences, teenagers used to be America’s most serious crime problem. In 2026, Generation Z now is less of a crime problem than grownups in their 50s – yes, age 50-59 – and much less of a crime situation than their parents in their 30s and 40s.
Don’t expect any reporters to ask cops for (gasp) numbers that might get in the way of florid reporting of savage adolescent mobs whose maraudings, mysteriously, don’t show up in cops’ own reports.
What should be important is not how much mostly-Black teens gathering in public might scare the aging gentry, not (and I know this betrays my Boomer me-me heritage) what cops, reporters, experts, or I “feel.” In an ideal world of unbiased science and critical thinking, Let “data regent omnia” – what can be shown?
My own experience with a “teen takeover”
On a crisp November 2021 morning, I was walking past nearly-all-Black Millwood School a couple of blocks from my house back in Oklahoma City when a growing group of students with signs gathering in the center median of Martin Luther King Avenue started gesturing to me, hey Mister, join us?
I’m an old White guy. Hundreds of Black teenagers… but okay, I crossed to the median and asked what the protest was about. Students pushed forward their spokesperson, a 9th grader who proceeded with Clarence Darrow precision to outline the case for clemency for imminent death-row inmate Julius Johnson.
Throngs of students continued to pour out of school and on to the avenue median, reaching hundreds. Totally unsupervised, peer organized at dozens of schools around the metro by (the horror!) social media.
I had read about the Jones injustices, and said, give me a sign. Now the bad part: Black youths, as early as middle school, realize the political utility of an older White, even one as decrepit as 71-year-old me. They pushed me to the front of the protest, right where heavy traffic to suburban Edmond and exurban-rural points north was roaring at us (school zones? haha) before dividing around the median. Thanks a lot. The protest got an amazing number of honks and waves and not a few fingers. I paid particular attention to Ford 150 and Silverado megatrucks with gunracks. I remember how Easy Rider ended.
What seemed like half the morning later, Millwood school administrators emerged, leisurely conferring. I was pleasantly surprised at their attitudes. The school vice principal saw me and came over to say he was proud of his students’ activism, he’d give them through the noon hour to maximize the protest, then would get them back to class.
Republican Governor Stitt commuted Jones’ death sentence that evening. Whether the protests influenced his rare decision, I can’t say. But this is clear: had the cops showed up as they would today to arrest some students on whatever charge they could muster – and especially if one or two of the hundreds of students had hollered or threw something or something rash – the headlines would be about dangerous teen mobs.
I know some may demur that, look, there have been teen takeovers that involved violence and vandalism, even a shooting (though cops blame shootings a mile away on teen gatherings), especially in Chicago. To which I reply: this is America. We suffer over 30,000 fatal and injurious gun assaults in a good year. Teens are Americans. If you’re appalled at this carnage, maybe you’d start with the unmentionable FBI stats showing most teenaged youth and child gun assault victims are shot at home by grownups.
Meanwhile, we older, supposedly brain-matured grownups can legally flood our bars and parties and outdoor regalias, commit two to three times more petty and serious crimes per capita (including shootings) than teenagers do, and no one holds us collectively guilty. This scapegoating attitude is one big reason the United States just can’t solve our globally disgraceful social crises – and bafflingly, other countries seem eager to join us in futility.
If there’s justice, a special place in hell is reserved for the “experts” – led by social scientists (my peers, subsidized by taxpayers to provide truthful information) – who popularize and monetize themselves joining official mobs vilifying easy scapegoats. As soon as some important interest gears up to grab credit, we may finally hear about Gen Z’s remarkable plummet in crime.