My brother and I were almost barred from the Montgomery Mall for life.
We were about 10 and 12 years old, visiting my grandparents in Bethesda, Maryland. As I recall it, Mike and I were first busted for going up a down escalator, and soon thereafter, the same security officer caught us riding down a different escalator by hoisting ourselves up on the rubber handrails. We were told to leave the mall and threatened with a permanent ban if we loitered.
As fate would have it, 35 years later, my sons are banned from the same mall. This isn’t a case of punishing the sons for the sins of the father, but it’s a different sort of guilt-by-association: My sons are the same rough age as other kids throughout the county who have gone on a multi-year crime spree, including assaults, shootings, and, of course, theft.
Increasingly, this criminality is occurring in the county’s malls, so this month, Westfield, the owner of the Wheaton and Montgomery malls, has barred all children after 3 p.m. unless accompanied by an adult over age 21.
The roots of this problem go back to 2020. Since the county closed its schools for a year, removed the hoops from the backboards, and outlawed Little League, the youth of Montgomery County have gone feral.
As the county politicians took away civilizing, pro-social activities from kids, they also handcuffed the cops. In the name of wokeness, the County Council barred armed security guards from high schools. County Executive Marc Elrich declared a policy of “Lessen[ing] police presence on streets as a direct measure to help diminish impacts of racial bias in interactions with Montgomery County police officers….”
The result was predictable: a youth crime wave. “As I review all of my detectives’ investigations,” one MoCo police official stated in 2023, “the individuals involved are getting younger and younger.”
By 2024, police noted that “juvenile-related violent crime increased 95% since 2019, and robbery, specifically, increased 108%.”
Arrests of juveniles fell in this same period, thanks to Maryland’s “Juvenile Justice Reform Act and the Child Interrogation Protection Act,” which made it harder to arrest young criminals.
The youth violence and criminality flared in the school hallways, at the football games, in the streets, and more recently in the county’s shopping malls.
A gang of teenagers followed a stranger into a bathroom at Wheaton Mall in March and stabbed him just for fun. Surveillance cameras show the boys’ glee at the occasion.
YOUTH CRIME WAVE IN WEALTHY DC SUBURB
A 17-year-old in July shot a 13-year-old at the same mall, for apparently no reason. He’s being charged with attempted murder. The tonier Montgomery Mall doesn’t have quite the same record of stabbings and shootings, but assaults in the first half of this year set a record pace, and they’ve started back up again along with the school year.
So the malls have decided that no schoolkids may hang out at the mall anymore. In other words, if we don’t have law and order, we can’t have nice things.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
