This is a serious question that I’m having difficulty with.
It seems like lately there’s a lot of teens having a grand ole time just breaking things, stealing kias, etc. Generally causing monetary distress to the communities they live in without actually stealing anything of value or use.
Like its not crimes of desperation, they’re not selling anything they steal, just having a good time breaking car windows and doing general mischief.
I know news media will amplify these for copaganda purposes. Hogs will go wild shouting for public executions of these teens, etc.
But like, what causes this and what can be done to help communities not have dangerously bored teens just absolutely fucking up people’s month or year by destroying their budget car they need to get to work, breaking windows which is expensive to fix, and just happens again, and generally just being dicks breaking things.
Not all the victims of crime are annoying SF tech bloggers which are easy to write off and laugh at.
if my simple mind has been completely taken advantage of, please let me know. I just don’t get the young chaos agents. I can defend people stealing from walgreens but I just don’t get breaking your neighbors shit.
EDIT: Since the real likely answer is sad and doomery, I want to invite folks to offer ideas of what could be done to strengthen these communities and give these kids an outlet.
Same thing as kids misbehaving in lower education at higher rates: society designed for profit rather than well-adjusted satisfied families, Covid being dealt with in the same way and never acknowledged, and the response from government is not to help teens and young adults struggling with life, but is to ban them from public spaces, isolate them further, and not respond until it impacts the national bottom line. When people don’t have opportunities, options, or community, they will lash out (sometimes in problematic ways) at whatever is closest. Not reactionary, not racist fearmongering about the teens running Chicago, just understanding that a sick society produces violent individuals
Ownership of public space and access to public utilities is a huge one. Not to mention that aggressive policing often creates the similar opposite reaction.
I remember during the New Labour years I lived for a while in one of the areas they trialed having ID cards with increased policing. Everyone who lived there saw an uptick in anti-social behaviour, vandalism etc. Kids just skating in a parking lot or hang around on a bench would get cops and community wardens hassling them, asking for ID, asking what they were doing etc. It must have sucked and if you get bothered for nothing all the time then either you start avoiding those public places where there are activities or you probably just think, fuck it, you’re treating me like a wrong’un anyway.
The absolute war on public spaces and young people in the UK cannot be underestimated. Community centres, swimming pools, and other activities have all been flogged off to corporate chains which are surprisingly expense and difficult to just go and use without a labyrinthine pre-booking system. A huge amount of public spaces (small parks, town squares, city ‘public’ areas) are now in fact owned by property developers that merely allow public access, but don’t want young people hanging around them and will have security guards move them on for literally nothing.
And now both major parties are pursuing anti-social behaviour and policing policies that are beyond belief - including things like removing all benches, bushes, and trees from public spaces so teens can be surveilled at all times from any angle while existing. Ep 193 of Podcasting Is Praxis gave a good reading and summary of it a while back.
The public space and access is a good point. I live near a couple public skate parks and went to them a few times. They’ll be doing classic stuff like smoking weed and starting tiny fires but as soon as some outsider comes and tags up the bowl with some obscenity, every skater is pissed off because they value the spot.
Lacking a place to just exist probably gets these kids pretty pissed off and like you mention, causes even more anti-social stuff.
Absolutely. You realise how ideological a lot of the push back for this stuff is too (especially here in the UK). If you’ll indulge an old man his local story time…
Where I live now the council spent a lot of money regenerating a few local areas (shopping, transport, local attractions etc) and as part of it spent a few million quid on a building and a small handful of part-time underpaid staff to be a community hub for young people to use and events and activities to be put on for them.
It was two floors, with some outdoor space, on the edge of a park. It took a few months for word to spread, staff to advertise stuff etc, but after about six months it was pretty busy. Events, activities, or clubs four or five evenings or afternoons a week getting anywhere between 35 - 150 kids each time. Art clubs, homework clubs, dance lessons, anime clubs, mental health and family help sessions, and on and on. Pretty good for a low investment of grant money in a much larger project.
But local councillors decided it wasn’t making enough money. Mostly because it didn’t make any money, because that’s the point. So they cleared out the majority of the bottom floor of activity and hangout space to install and then rent out a commercial cafe ran by a private corporation. The corporate tenant running the care pulled out after only 3 months because, as it turns out, a load of 10-16 year olds aren’t a great market for £7 salads and £3 espressos. And not many passers by ventured into the unadvertised cafe inside a building that had spent its entire time and long build up being pitched as a community hub for under 18s. Especially when there’s another cafe already in the park.
So now the council has actually spent a lot of non-grant non-free money to make the bottom floor an expensive, empty, unoccupied cafe while halving the amount of space for its intended purpose. Which of course all the lib-to-Tory councillors are using as a cudgel and making a big stink about it (despite the fact most of them voted for the cafe idea, I suspect cynically knowing how it would go).
But worse still, the downstairs they turned into a now empty, unopened cafe is the bit that’s visible to the streets and the park for passers by. So all the events and clubs and activities happen upstairs. As a result I constantly hear people talking about how it’s always empty, a waste of money, no one uses it etc. Hostile councillors are happily running with and reinforcing that sentiment to make the point that it was a waste of money to provide a space and programs for young people when they’re not interested in using them.
I’ve rebuffed this frequently at council meetings and to local people, even citing the fact that due to the part time staff and reduced space they actually can’t keep up with demand. And I know, because I know the person in charge of running and organising the events. But people aren’t interested, they don’t want to hear it. And I know that councillors have access to the reports and numbers that show consistent demand and success.
But people still don’t care, doing the thought terminating thing of it’s always looks empty. And it’s because they don’t want any services or activities for young people. Even if it makes anti-social behaviour worse, even if it increases crime, even if it means kids staying in a playing FIFA every night or hanging around on street corners, the same people who complain about that stuff prefer that over doing something for young people. Because they fucking hate young people. And the entire society encourages it because - no matter how liberal or offended by anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry or anti-immigrant sentiment you are - young people are the group you’re allowed and encouraged to fucking hate.
I was thinking along the lines of “no control of your life, nothing to lose, lash out with some creative destruction” but it felt like such a dead end answer.
I guess it is frustrating because we can’t just will some community programs into existence to get these kids to try an alternative past time. Things cost money and everyone is tight right now.
Also I feel like once you’re stealing cars and buying switches, community center wiffleball probably doesn’t hit the same.
This was the power of the BPP, give kids a positive example, build alternative institutions focused on collective liberation rather than individual satisfaction, but also look badass and be a “cool” alternative to other types of youthful disaffection/rebellion. The panthers were disciplined, but they also had enough aesthetic and ideological appeal to snap some youth out of the malaise
I work with kids, and also smashed shit as a kid.
I don’t believe there is a meaningful increase in this beviour.
I think this is what happens if you remove all agency to a group of people who desperately want it - they will take it even if it’s not “productive” to do so. It is productive to them if it means they get to feel a little bit of control, even for a moment.
Societies around the globe have had deeply established rituals to allow adolescents to transcend into adulthood and participate in society. The west infantilizes them until their early 20s, which is fine if you’re rich because your family can afford to enrich your life and give you opportunities to develop yourself in ways you’re proud of. If you’re poor you just get nothing, excluded from society. So yeah kids break shit.
I appreciate the response.
I don’t think what is happening is a broader trend, more so a fat blip on the general day to day.
As someone who works with kids, what do you think kids would want, agency wise or otherwise?
They want dignity, to be respected and treated as entire human beings, and they want to control over decisions that affect their lives. Just normal things most people want.
If you’re rich and your parents can pay for you to get really good at something you’re into, you have access to that dignity without actually having true agency.
Do you have statistically meaningful data to show that there has been an upswing? I don’t blame you for expressing concern, but to engage in dialogue without data is to sell short everyone involved. cheers!
Hey, i typed this while I started looking up stats. I know, not a great start.
I asked this because I have a friend in Rochester, NY who is at the very least left of the dem party and talks about material conditions, telling me about how one street had all the car windows broken twice in three weeks. Also I’ve been following the technical “how” of the kia boyz stuff.
It’s a pain to find specific stats, I’ve been able to find a 2018 stat of ~248/100k[1], then as of june 1st 2023, 2200 cars have been stolen in rochester ytd[2], which with a population of about ~200k, puts that as 4x increase from 5 years ago, and only halfway through the year.
So it appears to be a drastic increase, many of them are the hyundais and kias, which are typically just taken for a joy ride and trashed. But I don’t have the stats to determine how many of them are either of those brands.
Anyway, the second link obviously shows intent to be like “look at these evil TEENAGERS” using the kia as a specific example from the pig conference.
I know Kias are a popular target because somebody on Tiktok got viral showing how to very easily steal a bunch of a popular Kia models and then a trend of stealing Kias started
Yeah, I’m thinking of the scene in the 1970s documentary Dazed and Confused when they went around smashing mailboxes and throwing a bowling ball at stuff.
It’s cheap, fun, rebellious, and you can usually get away with it. Hard to imagine ever completely getting rid of it.
I don’t think it’s just sadness and doomery. Lots of other countries’ youth are sad and doomery, Japan and ROK for example having even worse stats than USA yet their crime rates across all ages are much lower
It’s really a somewhat uniquely cultural problem that America has with disregarding your fellow human beings
The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch addresses this but it is one of those books where they identify and analyze the issue but not come to a good solution
It’s also reactionary at times towards oppressed groups but like, he’s American and you’re reading a book in English so what more can you expect
Martial arts instruction would give them the opportunity to hit things as well as to meet new people outside of their little vandalism cliques, perhaps including those from other walks of life that they would remember next time they consider trashing some already-broken-down sedan or whatever.
Isn’t that kind of how Dagestan became a major host of MMA fighters? During the 90s and early 2000s there wasn’t much to do, so a bunch of guys with army backgrounds opened martial arts gyms and taught the kids how to wrestle/fight in a way that burned energy and didn’t burn the villages to the ground. I know that at least thats what happened with Khabib Nurmagomedov and his weirdo father.
