Brett Cooper — Cities Would Rather Let Teens Die Than Address The Problem

Well, that, my friends, is what the kids these days are calling a teen takeover. And to be fair, not all of them end up with shootings and arrests and riots, but a lot of them do. But at the end of the day, this is what happens when a few bad apples ruin the fun for everyone. And now, the government, cities, private businesses. They are trying to figure out what the hell they're going to do about this. But actually, the problems here do not really revolve around these teen takeovers. It is much deeper than that. It is systemic, I would say, and it actually goes back years and years and years of enabling and inaction. Now, before we dive into this insane story. I want to thank you guys so much for being here. If you enjoy this video, make sure to leave a like, subscribe to the channel, jump into the conversation. in the comment section, and of course, if you want to stay up to date on everything that we're doing here on the channel. Make sure to ring that notification bell. Alrighty. So if you have not seen it on social media, it has been wild on my algorithm over the past few months, teens are organizing, quote unquote, large gatherings, in public spaces like beaches, town centers, et cetera, via social media. And here are some of the flyers. These are the ones that circulate around TikTok and other social media platforms. And on the surface, you know, looking at this, seems great, right? You would hope that this could be cool. You know, we have talked so much over the last few years about the devastating impacts that COVID lockdowns had on young people, their mental health, their socialization. We literally talked about that. 2 days ago when I did my video about Fauci and his hearing, we have asked time and time again, parents have asked, what do we do to get kids outside to literally get them touching grass. How do we get them off of their phones? How do we get them to socialize and engage with community and other people? Well, young people figured it out for themselves. I guess they found a solution, but that solution has become deadly. Literally it has become deadly. And now, at least every other week, I guess in terms of what I'm seeing on social media, maybe it's even more, there are viral, viral, viral videos and stories coming out about how these gatherings, these teen takeovers end up in all out brawls. For example, at the beginning of the month, one in Pensacola ended up in a shooting. A 19-year-old man was killed and 6 others were injured in an overnight shooting after 100s of teens flooded downtown Pensacola, Florida. Also over the 4th of July in North Carolina, 9 people were shot and wounded, including one adult who was not part of the teen takeover just happened to be in the area. 2 days ago in Chicago, cops had to break up another one that turned into fighting. This is probably the, you know, 120th that's happened in Chicago over the last couple of years, and these are just 3 examples. Obviously, if you watch the top of the episode, you saw the montage. That is what is happening. And so now cities around the country are trying to figure out what the hell they can do to fix this problem. And so the 1st thing they started doing, and this is actually something that Trump has even been doing with his local team in Washington, DC, but they have started implementing curfews. And now they are increasing drone usage and police presence, and they are even threatening to charge parents for their children's involvement if their kids are out past these curfews. And while on the surface, at least based on my read. All of that sounds smart, because obviously you have to do something about this. It's a good solution because people are literally being shot and killed. It might not fully address the root cause of what is going on here because teenagers who are involved in this organizing these events, these gather wholesome gatherings. They are saying that they have nowhere else to go, that arcades are outdated or too expensive, that movies are too expensive, that literally everything is too expensive. And so people argue that all of this is leaving kids in mostly underprivileged communities with nowhere to go and hang out after school. No 3rd place, as many scholars like to call it. You know, you have your 1st place, your 2nd place, you have home and work. What do you do in between the two? Where do you go and socialize and find community? That is your 3rd place. They're saying that kids do not have that, hence why they wanted to create and have these block parties. And here are a couple Chicago teens explaining this rationale to their city council. There's so many pretty organizations that have so much funding, but it really doesn't do anything for the teens that need places to go after hours. We're not just asking for miracles or handouts. We're asking for opportunity that we deserve. And when you give us that, we don't just take it. We transform it. We belong in this city, and we need places to where we can truly belong, and we can feel like we can heal. They took all the free spaces from us, and they expect us not to go to the beach or go downtown. But there's nowhere for us to connect or meet new people. After hours right now, is what sparks time? That's when they're up. You can look at the data from TikTok, from all the social medias. They're up, they're out. And they're looking for something to do. So they're looking for something to do. They want a place to connect and heal and be with friends, whatever it is they are arguing to their city council. Now, some people agree, like this commenter on TikTok replied to that video from NBC, Chicago. I definitely think there should be more 3rd spaces for teens and young adults, like skating rinks and arcades, et cetera. There need to be places where youth can interact with each other in a free or affordable way. And I agree that a lot of those places have disappeared. Or, and I think that this is more relevant, and we see this more often, these young adult spaces have been transformed into adult spaces. So think about a Dave and Buster's. I think of Dave and Buster's now as an adult place where a bunch of guys get together. They get some beers, they're taking shots and they're playing old arcade games for the nostalgia of it all. We can even take this further. I've done videos on how the young adult genre of literature does not exist anymore, and now YA are weird porno, sexy books that women in their 30s are reading. They're not actually for young people, and now there is all of this confusion because young people see that, oh, it's a YA book. Now they're getting all this explicit content. Like things for young, young culture, tween culture, teen culture, it has disappeared in America. So I empathize with that and I do understand that, but also that does not mean that you get to go have riots in the middle of a street. That does not mean that you get to take over entire cities and kill each other and loot businesses. Two things can be true at once. Crazy idea, children. I know. Anyway, moving on from that in line with what I just said, I am more inclined to agree with this next commenter who said jobs. After school programs, libraries, parks, zoos, museums, planetarium, aquarium, like, what do you mean there's nowhere to go? Some parks even have rec centers. And I will add one more thing to the list. Attend GCU because it is so affordable. Now, Grand Canyon University is just genuinely different and that is why I keep talking about them and why I am so proud to partner with them. Now, you might not know this. I didn't know this honestly until like 3 years into working with them. But GCU literally froze their tuition cost back in 2009. That is not a typo. Literally, well, every other university has been hiking their rates and costs year after year taking advantage of students. GCU decided that they were going to make affordability a foundation of the school. And with GCU funded scholarships on top of that cost, the average student this year is paying only around $8,900 a year for a private Christian university. That is, remarkable. I am just shocked knowing what private university students are usually paying. It is incredible, but so is the education. With online, hybrid, and in-person classes at their Phoenix campus. GCU offers over 380 academic pathways, including degrees, embassies, and certificates, and they are all built for the real world. Plus, this is great. 90% of GCU students say that their faith deepened while they were there in college. So it is no wonder that while so many other colleges are bleeding money and going under, GC was one of the fastest growing universities in the country. 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This lack of 3rd place is the transformation, the, you know, the lack of youth culture, that is real. And life in 2026 with social media and everything going on in the world. It is different. It is more expensive for teenagers these days. However, teenagers struggling, trying to find things to do, that's not new. Young people have always had to face and overcome boredom. They have always had to deal with the fact that they don't have careers. They're not making a lot of money. So what are they going to do with that money? They need free things to do, but they didn't, in the past, historically, they did not always turn to brawls and shooting each other. Like, historically, teens have been able to make do with these, you know, parameters and boundaries around what they can do, where they can go, what access they have without killing each other. Like that is the not normal part of the story. And an interaction in the TikTok comment section actually summed this up really well. One young person said, teenagers literally have no places to go. Y'all get mad when teens are inside all the time, but get mad when they're not. Like, where are we supposed to go? And another person replied, I think, very respectfully, and said, I see a lot of teens in the comments trying to justify this. When I was a teen, we had to take turns at the local gas station because my peers stole so much that they no longer wanted groups of teens larger than 3 inside. We didn't storm the gas station. We took shifts like we were told, and by the end of the school year, things were back to normal. Adults don't hate you. They are just sick of their stuff getting ruined. So I guess what this person is saying is that, you know, teens have always rebelled. They have always acted out, but there is a way to get back into people's good graces. There is a way to earn back respect and earn back freedom. That's something that my mom and I would always talk about when she was raising me is that I had a lot of freedom. When I was younger, she really cared about fostering independence, but I was very aware that that freedom could be removed immediately. If I broke her trust, which I did a few times, if I was irresponsible, if I lied, whatever it was, that trust and freedom was immediately removed and I had to earn it back. But over time, you do learn. You overcome, you do earn it back, and it is possible for these people, but their response to all of this is just to make it worse, is to just continue shooting each other, is to host even bigger teen takeovers as rebellion. There was literally an article I was reading about this, where scholars were even like the academics that you all know I'm referring to, the ones that are enabling all of this. They were like, this is sticking it to the man, the underprivileged communities. No, it's just them being gross and violent is what's happening. Anyway, moving on from that. I'll get to that part later. But now, unfortunately, these groups, their behavior is causing issues for other young people who haven't done anything wrong. And now more and more businesses are closing their doors to teens, unless they are coming to shop or engage with a business with a chaperone. For example, back in 2023. So this has been happening for a while now. The 2nd largest mall in the state that is Garden State Plaza in New Jersey is requiring anybody under the age of 18 to be accompanied by a chaperone at least 21 or older on Fridays and Saturdays after 5 p.m. This move, according to the mall, follows an increase in disruptive behavior by a small minority of younger visitors. That included a reported brawl in the food court last year and a fight in March that brought swarms of policemen to the center, but ended up being a smaller altercation than initially reported. One mom chimed in and talked to this reporter and said, on Fridays and Saturdays, it has just been a madhouse, but her son, a teenager, also spoke to the reporter and said that he, on the other hand, was disappointed, although he acknowledged the frequent mall fights he lamented because it was the main place to go and roam around and hang out with my friends, and I am sad. Now, this is not just happening in New Jersey. This is happening in malls around Nashville. Like now, when Alex and I go see a movie. I'm literally getting ID'd. At the mall entrance on a Friday night when I'm just trying to get into the movie theater that I can see from across the hall, but there's a security guard standing at the door. And it's crazy that this is happening at the mall of all places because that used to be the 3rd place for young people where you could just go and buy a bag of popcorn or a pretzel and not have to spend a ton of money, be inside and hang out, and now the malls are even shutting their doors on young people because the behavior is so atrocious. Now, similarly, also back in 2023, a Chick-fil-A in Pennsylvania went viral when they banned minors, without an adult. The owner of this franchise said that they had contemplated long and hard before deciding this and posting this. And while they love being a community restaurant and serving guest of all ages, some issues need to be addressed. When groups of unaccompanied children and teens visit our restaurant, the following unacceptable behaviors often occur. They are loud, and their conversation often contains a lot of explicit language. Food and trash are often thrown around and left on tables, shares on the floor. Tables and restrooms are vandalized, decorations are stolen. Eloyees are laughed at, made fun of and treated rudely. Employees are cursed at and ignored when they ask the children and teens to either change their behavior or leave. Unsafe behaviors also occur while they are walking through the parking lot and through the drive-through lanes. So just summing all of this up here, as you saw on the TikTok comments, there are a lot of young people now, that are resentful over the businesses, you know, stepping in, shutting things down, curfews, you have to be chaperoned, whatever it is, but this is a really nuanced issue because obviously, banning teenagers from their frequent hangout spots. It was never going to solve the entire problem. Honestly, it probably only made it worse considering these teen takeovers that are now happening every single weekend that are resulting in death, but also, even though that didn't really help, it is not private businesses jobs to police delinquent young people. It is not their job to bear the cost of their destruction and their bad behavior. They should not have to put their employees at risk just to give young people a 3rd space. And I do feel, for what I hope are, you know, the genuine teenagers that we saw at that city council meeting. Oh, again, hopefully they are genuine. I feel for them if they don't have $30 to go to the movies or 40 or 50 or $100 to spend an evening at Dave and Buster's, but like, come on, the rest of the situation is so simple. If you cannot act like respectful, decent adults in public, then you are not going to be treated like adults, and you are not going to have the freedom the well-behaved adults have, especially when the entire reason why you are, you know, being banned and while you have curfews is because of how you act. And so now you're acting out even more, resulting in literal death, and you're wondering why people are not opening their doors up for you. All right, so now that we have gotten through that part of the story, there is another angle to all of this, and it would be very disingenuous of me to do this episode without talking about it because it is the most discussed point when these things are talked about on X, and it is the race component. of these teen takeovers and the violence that occurs within them because the majority, as you saw, the majority of the people in these viral videos, when the gatherings turn into shootings and brawls, they are black. They are young black kids. And in 2020, me saying anything like this online would have gotten me, you know, tarred and feathered and docks and all the things, but it's 2026. Hopefully we can all be rational adults here and acknowledge that that is not racism. It is the behavior from usually, not always usually, a certain race that we are watching takeover. It is the behavior that people see in certain neighborhoods that makes them want to move because they don't feel like their family is safe. It is the behavior, that other law abiding black Americans see, like my best friend, Amir Odom, and they see this, and it makes them lose it because they know it's wrong. They know it's unacceptable and they hate being lumped in with literal, violent and ghetto behavior. They don't want to be compared to that because they know it is so bad and it's so awful. And by the way, if you relate to what I am saying in regards to a mirror, then you will love his channel. He has done tons of videos about this topic, about teen takeover specifically, so go watch that if you're interested. He's amazing and my best friend. anyway, back to the point. race is being discussed here. It's obviously being discussed on next. We will bring it up a lot. It is being discussed more broadly, but, of course, if you are to bring it up, you might have a Georgetown law professor gaslight you and say that actually, what you're doing here is sensationalizing things, which is exactly what he told NPR when he was asked about the situation. Now, the full quote from him reads. The reality is, in so many of these instances, we are sensationalizing teenagers, often lower income children of color, who are taking over, if you will, or visiting gentrified neighborhoods. The focus becomes on the delinquent or criminal activity that takes place. Oh, yes, they are simply visiting the other neighborhoods as they fight in the streets as they beat each other to a pulp where kids are left in ditches. Literally when they are shooting each other. They're just visiting the next town over. And gosh, why are we focusing on that delinquent behavior when we could be focusing on... What else? That is this story. Like, nobody is gonna write an article about the nice, wholesome little block party that only took place for five minutes before somebody's weave was snatched and shots started firing. That's not the story. The end result is, and it is lying to the public to ignore it, and it is not racist to address it. I actually think it would be helpful if we just addressed it head on. Because what I personally believe, is actually racist and offensive, is to allow that kind of behavior to continue, to literally enable and often empower the downward spiral of an entire community and a generation to allow death and violence because you are too afraid of what angry people online might call you. And yes, I'm saying that to people who dance around, race, and that sort of thing, but I'm mostly saying that, people in government, people in places of authority who have the ability to mitigate this and work with these communities that you're too afraid to say the hard thing because you don't want to be labeled racist, because you don't want to be stepping on any toes, any, you know, generational trauma, whatever it is. We're over it. It's just labels and words. It does not matter. Stop enabling this behavior. Because it is a problem. Obviously, it is a problem. I gave you 3 examples for things that just happened in the last couple of weeks. It is a problem that terrorizes businesses and law abiding citizens and truly makes some areas unlivable if you are a family that values your safety and tea and takeovers, just this one thing. It is an explosion. They are truly the embodiment and the result of years and years of ignoring and enabling because people were too scared to say the quiet part out loud