Even a former Biden White House advisor is calling out Democratic-run cities run amok with crime after a chaotic “juvenile takeover” disrupted Washington, D.C.’s upscale Navy Yard neighborhood Saturday night, as hundreds of teens flooded the area, sparking fights, robberies and gunfire.
“Blue cities need to wake up,” Yemisi Egbewole wrote Sunday on X, responding to social media video showing the melee. “Tolerating this behavior is unfair to the residents who live here and unfair to the kids themselves.”
The disturbance comes just days after the district established a temporary juvenile curfew zone in the same Navy Yard area. While a citywide curfew for minors begins at 11 p.m., critics say teen “takeovers” continue to plague the city.
“The behavior displayed [Saturday] night in Navy Yard cannot be tolerated, and we are very thankful that no one was seriously injured,” interim Metropolitan Chief of Police Jeffery W. Carroll, a Mayor Muriel Bowser appointee, told WUSA 9 on Sunday.
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“I commend our members and our partners for their professionalism and for safely recovering two firearms from individuals within this group. We need parents and guardians to be proactive and know where their children are and who they are with at all times.”
In Saturday’s latest outbreak, police say the crowd began forming around 6:30 p.m. ET in a park near First Street and New Jersey Avenue SE, swelling to roughly 200 teens by 8:30 p.m.
Video circulating on social media shows large groups of mostly black-clad teens running through the streets, screaming and fighting as officers tried to disperse the crowd.
Just before 9:15 p.m., police say a group of teens assaulted and robbed another teen of his shoes and jacket. Minutes later, additional fights broke out near First and M Streets SE, according to WUSA 9.
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Around 9:45 p.m., National Guard members witnessed a 15-year-old fire a gun into the air inside the park. The teen was quickly apprehended and charged with unlawful discharge of a firearm, endangerment with a firearm and carrying a pistol without a license.
Police say the chaos continued shortly after, when another group of teens jumped and robbed two more juveniles near New Jersey Avenue and M Street. The victims later went to a hospital with injuries.
At about 10:34 p.m., the Secret Service stopped a rideshare vehicle after spotting a suspect matching a police description. A 16-year-old was arrested after officers recovered a firearm he allegedly tried to discard.
In total, two juveniles were arrested and two firearms recovered. Despite the violence, authorities say no serious injuries were reported.
