Teen Takeovers Are Spreading. Why?

Summary

Morning Wire Podcast Summary

Episode: Teen Takeovers Are Spreading. Why?
Release Date: May 24, 2026
Hosts: John Bickley & Georgia Howe
Guest: Heather MacDonald, Author & Fellow at the Manhattan Institute

---

Episode Overview

This episode of Morning Wire dives into the alarming trend of "teen takeovers"—large-scale incidents of teenage group crime in U.S. cities. John Bickley and Georgia Howe are joined by crime trends expert Heather MacDonald, who analyzes the roots, recent escalation, and the impact of shifting social, policing, and educational policies on youth crime. The discussion addresses family breakdown, the erosion of discipline in schools, social media's influence, and changes in law enforcement practices—as well as the consequences these have on urban life and public safety.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Historical Context & Recent Escalation

• Teen takeovers are not a new phenomenon:
  • MacDonald notes, "They're called teen takeovers. They used to be called flash mobs or wilding. And I guess it's just a function of the media needing to have a new story. This is completely standard." (03:43)
  • Cites past events, such as 2020 Chicago looting, Florida spring break shootings, LA 7-Eleven rampages, and Philly mobbing.

2. Root Causes: Family and Social Structure

• Family Breakdown:
  • MacDonald identifies the erosion of traditional family structures, particularly in black communities, as a primary cause.
  • “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...” (03:43)
• School Discipline & Policy Changes:
  • Under both the Obama and Biden administrations, policies discouraged disciplining black students to avoid racial disparities in discipline stats, resulting in generally lax discipline.
  • “If there's no structure in the home, you have something called multi partner fertility...the child's only hope for learning self control, self discipline, deferred gratification is in the school...But teachers now have been told they can't do that.” (05:12)

3. Impact of Social Media

• Role in Organization, but Not the Root Cause:
  • Social media helps organize these incidents and amplifies them, but MacDonald argues it is not central: “These have been happening before...to the same extent.” (07:39)
  • The focus, she insists, should remain on parenting and community socialization.

4. Policing and its Political Context

• Post-Ferguson and George Floyd Era:
  • Anti-police rhetoric after high-profile cases has led to police being less proactive out of fear of backlash.
  • Defund the police movements and city policies (e.g., ending “pretextual stops” in LA, Chicago’s anti-police political climate) have limited effective policing.
• MacDonald on the political climate:
  • “There's no organization that cares more about black lives than police departments.” (09:31)
  • “Crime goes through the roof [when police pull back]. In 2020, after the George Floyd riots, you had the largest single increase in homicide in this nation's history. 29%.” (09:31)

5. Manipulation & Reliability of Crime Statistics

• Crime statistics skepticism:
  • Some cities may be reclassifying crimes to lower their reported rates: “A certain percentage of managers in that situation are going to...figure out ways to reclassify felonies as misdemeanors.” (12:22)
  • But, as MacDonald puts it, “Murders don't lie. You can't hide the bodies.” (12:22)

6. Police Recruitment and Resource Issues

• Ongoing shortages in major cities:
  • “Los Angeles is perennially understaffed... New York needs more cops. Chicago needs more cops.” (13:40)
  • Red states are faring better, sometimes recruiting from more troubled departments.

7. Looking Ahead: Social and Urban Consequences

• Continued Flight from Cities:

  • As crime and disorder remain high, people with the resources to leave urban centers are increasingly doing so.
  • “They're going to have fewer people to police because people are leaving. It is just incompatible with a civilized society that you can have the shoplifting that's going on.” (14:55)

• Forgetting Broken Windows Policing:

  • MacDonald laments the loss of “broken windows” policing and the successes of the Giuliani/Bratton-era NYC crime reductions:
    • “We forgot the lesson that enforcement is the way to have a second best solution to the breakdown of socialization in the family. And so people who can leave are going to leave.” (14:55)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the real issue:
  • “Americans turn their eyes away from the Real problem, which is the failure to socialize a very large number of overwhelmingly black young people.” - Heather MacDonald (07:39)
• About police’s role and risks:
  • “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.” - Heather MacDonald (09:31)
• On the cyclical nature of crime stats:
  • “Everybody's celebrating now that that crime is coming down, but it's coming down from an unprecedented high. So it's a little early to celebrate as far as I'm concerned.” - Heather MacDonald (09:31)
• On urban decline:
  • “It is just incompatible with a civilized society that you can have the shoplifting that's going on. ...A lot of people are just going to say, this is not necessary. We should not accept that this degree of crime...is a normal part of city life.” - Heather MacDonald (14:55)

---

Key Timestamps

• [03:43] — Heather MacDonald on decades of urban youth violence and changing terminology
• [05:12] — On family breakdown and school discipline failures
• [07:39] — Social media’s influence and missing the real cause
• [09:31] — Anti-police politics and post-Floyd crime surge
• [12:22] — Manipulation of crime statistics
• [13:40] — Police recruitment issues in major cities
• [14:55] — Consequences for cities: exodus and forgetting past lessons

---

Overall Tone

The episode maintains a candid, critical, and often somber tone. Both hosts and Heather MacDonald are forthright in confronting sensitive issues around crime, race, policy, and urban decline. MacDonald especially offers a direct, unapologetic critique of current leadership and cultural priorities, urging a return to proactive law enforcement and personal responsibility, while delivering her arguments with a sense of urgency and concern for the future of American cities.

---

Summary prepared for listeners seeking the substance and arguments of the episode, with timestamps for convenient reference.

Transcript

[Narrator/Announcer]

Colorado is trying to silence free speech again. A state law forces businesses to use customers preferred pronouns even if they're biologically inaccurate. With the help of Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian bookstore and a sports apparel company are challenging the law, but a court recently ruled against them. They appealed the ruling, and with ADF's help, they'll keep fighting another attempt by Colorado to skirt the First Amendment. Learn more about how you can support free speech by Texting Wire to 83848 or going to joinadf.com wire.

[Heather MacDonald]

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.

[Georgia Howell]

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.

[John Bickley]

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 Howell. This is a weekend edition of Morning wire.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Voice]

Spring is in full bloom and you can feel the shift everywhere. People are outside again, and many of us are getting back into healthier routines after maybe letting those New Year's resolutions slide a little over the winter. The word wardrobe needs a reset. The heavy winter layers disappear, temperatures start climbing, and suddenly everyone wants clothes that feel lightweight, comfortable and easy to wear all day long without sacrificing style. That's where Fabletics has really impressed us this season. New VIP members can get 70 to 80% off everything, which makes refreshing those go to spring and summer pieces feel a lot more doable. The fabrics feel soft, breathable and genuinely premium without the premium price tag. What really makes Fabletics work, though, is how wearable everything is. Their activewear lounge pieces and everyday styles are designed to move through your entire day with you. Workouts, errands, travel days, relaxing at home. All of it. Activewear, loungewear, everyday basics, even scrubs. It's all in one place. Shop [e-mail] wire to get 70 to 80% off everything. When you sign up as a new VIP, take a quick style quiz and be sure to select Wire when prompted to unlock this offer. This is a limited time offer, so don't wait. Did you know the average employer gets around 250 resumes for every single job opening. Well, if you're hiring, here's good news. You can now review all these resumes and applications faster, thanks to ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter has a new feature that instantly shows you the most interested qualified candidates. First, ZipRecruiter makes hiring easier by instantly matching you with qualified candidates. And now with their new feature, candidates who are especially interested in your job automatically appear at the top of your list. So you can connect faster with people who really want the role. Try it for [e-mail] that's ziprecruiter.com wire.

[John Bickley]

Joining us now is Heather McDonald, 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.

[Heather MacDonald]

Great to be with you, John. Thank you.

[John Bickley]

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. When you look at recent incidents, particularly involving young people in major cities, what stands out to you the most right now?

[Heather MacDonald]

The sheer repetition of it. We have a very convenient oblivion to the fact that this has been going on for decades now. They're called teen takeovers. They used to be called flash mobs or wilding. And 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 the other side of the rivers because the looting was so bad, the attacks were so bad. You have spring break periodically in Florida where people are getting shot. You've had the flash mobs in Los Angeles where teens are rampaging through seven elevens, grabbing everything in sight. The street takeovers. Philadelphia, you've had the same mobbing. So this is a long standing problem and 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.

[Georgia Howell]

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?

[Heather MacDonald]

Well, the schools have been absolutely denatured Demobilized as far as being able to impose discipline in the classroom. And that's an astute question, Georgia, because 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 Luigi Mangione's murder. And 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 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 going to 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. But that again is a long standing 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, you know, George Floyd riot or Ferguson riot in their city. So there's a big pressure to just watch and be passive rather than proactive.

[Georgia Howell]

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

[Heather MacDonald]

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 promote the the videos that are inevitably taken, the trophy videos of people beating up on innocent passersby and stripping Apple stores 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 for 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.

[John Bickley]

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 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?

[Heather MacDonald]

No, it has led up, 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. 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. So it's a little early 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 mental institutions. But nevertheless, though crime remains at a completely unacceptable rate. The property crime, the assault, 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, there's a lot more that could be done.

[Georgia Howell]

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?

[Heather MacDonald]

Yeah, I think places like Baltimore, Detroit, Trenton, they have given some cover to their officers. But front and center are the Brandon Johnson's. 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. The cops are going where the crime is. They're going where they're getting the 911 calls. They're using their powers of observation to try and suss out suspicious behavior. Those are legitimate stops. 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 investigative stops, as they're called in Los Angeles.

[Georgia Howell]

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

[Heather MacDonald]

It's alleged. It's alleged for Washington D.C. it's been alleged for New York. That is probably going on. 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 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 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. Murders don't lie. You can't hide the bodies. And those are down from the George Floyd highs, but they're still way too high.

[John Bickley]

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?

[Heather MacDonald]

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 Mandami 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.

[Georgia Howell]

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?

[Heather MacDonald]

Well, they're going to have fewer people to police because people are leaving. It is just incompatible with a civilized society that you can have the shoplifting that's going on. 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 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 stairs by a lunatic who should not be there with a criminal record of a dozen to two dozen to three dozen arrests. 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 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 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. And so people who can leave are going to leave.

[John Bickley]

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.

[Heather MacDonald]

Thank you, John and Georgia.

[Georgia Howell]

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

[Ryan Reynolds]

Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to [e-mail]

[Heather MacDonald]

Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate, first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees, extra fee, full terms at Mint Mo. Com.