Transcript of Teen Takeovers Are Spreading. Why? New

What we're seeing increasingly across the district is not only unacceptable, it is violent, it is dangerous, and it is illegal. And we're looking at the parents to make sure that they understand that they are responsible for the upheaval that is going on in this district that is impacting everyone who lives here.

That was U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro responding to a fresh instance of teenage violence in her city. In cities across the country, teenagers are gathering to commit violent crimes en masse in the name of social media clout.

Heather McDonald joins us today to discuss the teen takeover trend, what's fueling it, and what can actually be done to stop it. I'm Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe. This is a weekend edition of Morning Wire.

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Joinning us now is Heather MacDonald, author of The War on Cops and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where she's a contributing editor of City Journal. A woman with many titles. Heather, great to have you on.

Great to be with you, John. Thank you.

So we've had a recent rash of teenage degenerate behavior, to put it one way. Street takeovers and ramming cops in Chicago. There were some young Jewish girls assaulted by young Palestinian activists in New York and more of this kind of stuff. You've studied crime trends for decades. Uh, when you look at recent incidents, particularly involving young people in major cities, what stands out to you the most right now?

The sheer repetition of it. Uh, we have a very convenient, uh, oblivion to the fact that this has been going on for decades. Uh, now they're called teen takeovers. They used to be called flash mobs or wilding. Uh, and it's— I guess it's just a function of the media needing to have a new story. This is completely standard. In 2020, you had the mayor of Chicago lowering all the drawbridges to the Loop and downtown Chicago to try and prevent the barbarian hordes coming over from, from the other side of the rivers. Because the looting was so bad, the attacks were so bad. Uh, you have spring break periodically in Florida, uh, where people are getting shot. You've had the, the flash mobs in Los Angeles where teens are rampaging through 7-Elevens, uh, grabbing everything in sight. The street takeovers. Philadelphia, you've had this, the same mobbing. So this is a long-standing problem And, uh, nobody wants to talk about what the causes are, which is Black family breakdown and the fact that a lot of these kids are not being socialized. And the criminal justice is terrified really to do anything about it.

Now, you mentioned family breakdown. Have there also been other changes too? For example, things like policing or anything having to do with schools, or would you say family structure is the main issue here?

Well, the schools have been absolutely, uh, denatured, demobilized as far as being able to impose discipline in the classroom. And that's an astute question, Georgia, because, you know, for, for especially under the Obama administration, continuing under Biden, there was this phony conceit that if schools disciplined Black students at a higher rate, that's because the teachers were racist or the principals were racist, which is the most ludicrous idea There's no more left-wing profession than teachers in this country, as we've seen numerous times with the celebrations of Charlie Kirk's murder and, and Luigi Mangione's murder. And an ed school is just one long marination in white privilege theory. But the idea was, is that if Black kids are getting disciplined at a higher rate, it's because of systemic racism. And so the Obama administration sued schools to make them get, basically get rid of discipline because, you know, you have two options. You can continue with so-called disparate impact and actually mete out justified consequences, or you can just throw up your hands and say, okay, in order to avoid disciplining Black students, we're gonna not discipline anybody. And that's what schools have been doing. And if there's no structure in the home, you have something called multi-partner fertility, a very antiseptic term from sociology that means one boyfriend after another moving through the home, and a mother has children by several different males.

If that situation is chaotic, the child's only hope for learning self-control, self-discipline, deferred gratification is in the school, is in the classroom. But teachers now have been told they can't do that. So— but that again is a longstanding change None of this is new. Policing obviously has been under one prolonged assault since the Ferguson riots, saying that if they arrest Black juveniles or Black criminals, that they're racist. And so the pressure is on them not to intervene at all because they don't want another George Floyd riot or Ferguson riot in their city. So there's a big pressure to just watch and be passive rather than proactive.

Now, what about social media? How does that play into some of the crime trends that we've seen?

It does. I mean, we've been hearing endlessly that these are organized on social media, but I think that's a dead end to go down. It's irrelevant. These have been happening before there was social media to the same extent. I've heard a proposal to somehow hold the media companies responsible if they, uh, promote the, the videos that are inevitably taken, the trophy videos of people beating up on innocent, uh, passersby and, and, and stripping Apple Stores, uh, bare. Again, Americans turn their eyes away from the real problem, which is the failure to socialize a very large number of Overwhelmingly Black young people. That's what we have to focus on. Although I have to say, I don't want to be too pessimistic here, Georgia, but we've been focusing for decades and not much has changed. It's up to the parents themselves. It's up to the community leaders to say, we're sick of this. Start obeying the law. Control your kids. Don't let them run it, run the streets at night.

Now, you mentioned 2020, the George Floyd riots and how we really saw a peak in anti-cop rhetoric there. But I did want to highlight, this is continuing. We saw the Los Angeles City Council vote unanimously to end pretextual police stops by the LAPD. Any police stops that end up often, uh, finding real criminal behavior, we want to stop those because it leads to more often minority arrests. We're also seeing similar language from Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. He says law enforcement is a sickness in Chicago that he wants to eradicate. Have we seen any letting up at all of the, you know, defund the police narrative? Has it just taken on more different rhetoric? Is that what's happening?

No, it has let up, uh, but not, not sufficiently. And there has not been enough of a discourse in that is affirmatively in the opposite direction, saying that the police— there's no organization that cares more about Black lives than police departments. They are putting themselves on the line every single day to try and protect the thousands of law-abiding, hardworking Black residents of high-crime neighborhoods. And when the police back off, very predictably, we've seen this again and again after moments of mass hysteria about phony police racism, uh, crime goes through the roof. In 2020, after the George Floyd riots, you had the largest single increase in homicide in this nation's history, 29%. Everybody's celebrating now that that crime is coming down, but it's coming down from an unprecedented high. Uh, so it's a little early to, to celebrate as far as I'm concerned when you still have these completely grotesque assaults that are going on in cities by drug-addicted, mentally ill people who should be in prison or in, in mental institutions. But nevertheless, though, though crime remains at a completely unacceptable rate, the property crime the assaults. There has been baby steps towards giving secret permission to the cops to try and be a little bit more proactive, to do a little bit more of the essential broken windows policing.

Nevertheless, uh, there's a lot more that could be done.

So even in some of these high-crime cities or these deep blue cities, the officers are being deputized to do that, or where is that advice coming from?

Yeah, I think places like Baltimore, Detroit, Trenton, uh, they have given some cover to their officers, but front and center are the Brandon Johnsons. You know, we've heard about a pretextual stop is a stop that has stopped a Black or Hispanic person and found drugs or weapons. Uh, the cops are going where the crime is. They're going where The— they're getting the 9/11 calls. They're using their powers of observation, uh, to try and suss out, uh, suspicious behavior. Those are legitimate stops. Uh, a very left-wing criminal professor, criminal law professor of mine at Stanford Law School, once in a— in an unguarded moment said there's nothing more important that the police can do to lower gun crime than these types of, uh, investigative stops, as they're called in Los Angeles.

Now, how much can we trust the crime stats that we're being given? I understand that sometimes they just reclassify certain crimes to, um, massage the numbers a little bit. Is that something that you've seen go on?

It's, it's alleged. It's alleged for Washington, D.C. It's been alleged for New York. That is probably going on. Uh, this is one of the drawbacks of the fantastic accountability revolution that began under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and William Bratton, which put rightful pressure on police commanders to lower crime in their, in their precincts and to show results. And a certain percentage of managers in that situation are going to feel under such pressure that they are going to massage things and, and figure out ways to reclassify felonies as as misdemeanors. That having been said, I'm not going to claim that the crime drop that is being touted by the mainstream media is completely phony. Uh, murders don't lie. You can't hide the bodies. And those are down from the George Floyd highs, uh, but they're still way too high.

What about police recruitment? There was a lot of focus on that a few years back. Are we still seeing a lot of these departments bleeding officers? Or are measures like in Florida really having an effect where they're recruiting NYPD officers, giving them really great benefits? What is it? Is this sort of evening out in different areas, or are we seeing red states with a larger police force? What are we seeing on that front?

I can't necessarily speak to the red states, but I will say that the big cities are still really bleeding. Los Angeles is bleeding there. Los Angeles is perennially understaffed. They are lean and mean, and they need, you know, 5,000 more cops. The mayoral debate with Karen Bass, she's objecting to the fact that her opponent wants to hire more cops rather than hire more social workers, as if these feckless social workers have a clue how to stop crime. It's a complete waste of money. New York needs more cops. Chicago needs more cops. And yes, Cops still feel under the gun. They still feel underappreciated. They're not particularly persuaded by Zora Mondame in New York City, who occasionally sends out minor pro-police sounds in the context of what is in fact still a worldview that views the police as the oppressor and criminals as the victims.

If the current policies continue and these trends continue, what do you expect crime and policing in some of these major cities to look like a few years down the line?

Well, they're going to have fewer people to police because people are leaving. Uh, it is just incompatible with a civilized society that you can have, uh, the shoplifting that's going on. The, the FBI has started collecting data on this and it just goes up and up and up. There's no improvement in New York. The, the drugstores still have things under plexiglass. And that is, you have to have security of property. You have to be able to walk to the subways and not worry about getting pushed into the tracks or into a subway car or down the, down the stairs, uh, by a lunatic who should not be there with a criminal record of, of a dozen to two dozen to three dozen arrests. They're— those criminals are not being put in prison for the same reason as everything else, disparate impact. The criminal justice system has decided it would rather not put anybody in jail than put in— put Blacks in jail disproportionately, notwithstanding that sadly their crime rates justify exactly that disproportion. And a lot of people are just going to say this is not necessary. We should not accept that this degree of crime, of property theft, of disorder, of threat is a normal part of city life.

Rudolph Giuliani in the '90s, he struck back against that assumption. All the criminologists had said, oh well, we just have to accept that America is a violent place and you can't do anything about lowering crime. Even the police used to say that, the FBI's annual crime report, the Uniform Crime Report, had a disclaimer throughout the '80s saying, well, we all know the police can't do anything about lowering crime because that's because of racism and inequality. And Giuliani and Bratton said, nope, sorry, we're lowering crime. The police are going to, are going to bring safety. And it worked. And we've forgotten that lesson. We forgot the lesson that enforcement is the way to have a second-best solution to the breakdown of socialization in the family. Uh, and so people who can leave are going to leave.

Well, all of this really does help contextualize why we're seeing this mass exodus out of a lot of these big cities, particularly in the blue states. Heather, thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you, John and Georgia.

That was author and fellow at the Manhattan Institute Heather MacDonald, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.