We need to talk about the kids in Washington, D.C., and why blue cities need to wake up.
Last weekend, roughly 200 juveniles flooded Navy Yard, one of the city’s busiest dining and nightlife districts. What followed was exactly the kind of chaos D.C. residents have become far too used to: fights, robberies, businesses locking their doors, terrified residents ducking inside, two guns recovered and a 15-year-old accused of firing shots into the air. Three juveniles were reportedly robbed. Two of them were beaten badly enough to go to the hospital.
And my first thought when I saw the videos was not shock. It was, “Oh no, not again.” That is the problem.
VIOLENT DC TEEN TAKEOVER IN UPSCALE NEIGHBORHOOD ESCALATES TO GUNFIRE
These so-called teen takeovers are no longer being treated like a five-alarm warning. They are becoming background noise in a city that has started normalizing behavior that should never be normal.
Navy Yard residents have been sounding the alarm for months. There were similar incidents last year, including large, disorderly gatherings, fights and Halloween chaos that required a law enforcement response.
The response from too many people, especially online, has been the same tired excuse-making. The kids need more places to go. They need more recreation centers. They need more third spaces.
Please. We are not living in 1998. These are not kids wandering around looking for an open gym at 10 p.m. They are on their phones. They are on TikTok. They are organizing online and meeting up in places where adults live, work, eat and spend money. And even if they were not, the answer to a 12-year-old or 13-year-old being out in a chaotic nightlife district late at night is not to invent a better hangout spot. The answer is that they should be at home.
That may sound harsh, but it is not cruel. It is common sense. And when people say, “Well, sometimes home is not safe,” my answer is simple: then that is a failure that should activate government intervention, child welfare and social services. It is not a justification for children roaming city streets at night in the middle of violence-prone gatherings.
Mayor Muriel Bowser got this exactly right after the latest Navy Yard incident. She said she was disappointed and pushed back on the idea that the issue is simply that kids need more to do. In her view, kids have ample programs. What is missing is accountability for families and children who think it is acceptable to treat a neighborhood this way. She is right.
Children need compassion, yes. But they also need instruction. They need boundaries. They need consequences. They need adults who care enough to tell them no. What too many progressive leaders offer instead is a form of neglect dressed up as empathy. They hear discipline and think punishment. They hear accountability and think cruelty. In reality, refusing to correct dangerous behavior is its own kind of abandonment.
D.C.’s curfew debate shows exactly how unserious this city can be. The citywide juvenile curfew begins at 11 p.m., and police have also had authority to establish earlier curfew zones starting at 8 p.m. in hotspots where large groups of minors gather. That tool was used in Navy Yard just the weekend before this latest takeover. But now the authority for those earlier curfew zones is set to expire in April, and there may not be enough votes on the Council to keep it in place.
Let me be clear: a curfew is not a long-term solution. It is not a cure-all. But it is something. It is one of the few tools city leaders have right now to create immediate order while they work on bigger interventions. If the Council cannot come up with a real long-term answer, then taking away even the short-term tool is political malpractice.
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And this is where the D.C. mayor’s race matters. Voters deserve to hear, in plain English, what candidates like Janeese Lewis George and Kenyan McDuffie actually plan to do. Lewis George has expressed concern about the curfew approach. McDuffie has argued curfews are not a permanent solution and should not replace deeper investments. Fine. Permanent solution or not, residents still need to know what their Democratic leaders intend to do here, because “more compassion” cannot just mean more chaos.
There is also a bigger moral issue here. Civil society is a contract. People work. They pay taxes. They obey the rules. In return, they expect a basic level of order and safety. They expect to be able to go to dinner, attend a baseball game, walk home, or sit in their neighborhood without fearing that a pack of unsupervised minors can shut the whole thing down. When government fails to uphold that contract, people lose faith. And when people lose faith, cities decline.
What happened in Navy Yard was not harmless teenage mischief. It was a warning. Teenagers test boundaries. That is what they do. But when the adults in charge refuse to enforce any boundaries at all, those tests get more dangerous. This time, a gun was fired into the air. Next time, a child could die.
Tolerating this behavior is unfair to residents, unfair to businesses, and unfair to the kids themselves. If Democrats want voters to trust them to govern, then they need to show they can still do the most basic thing government is supposed to do: protect the public and tell the truth about what is going wrong. And in cities like D.C., that may have to start with saying something that should not be controversial at all: our children need more discipline, more accountability, and a lot less excuse-making.
