Large crowds and lots of flashing police lights filled the Loop Wednesday night.
Video submitted to the Citizen app shows a group milling about near Wabash Avenue and Randolph Street near the Loop ‘L’ tracks. The video does not make clear what the group is doing, but sirens are heard in the background.
The fighting went on along State Street as well.
Chicago police officers, Cook County Sheriff’s deputies, and Chicago firefighters responded to the scene. A few people were seen being put into handcuffs, and someone was also seen being wheeled away on a stretcher.
Another person is seen washing their eyes out with water.
Community activist Sandie Norman said she saw hundreds of young people on the streets Wednesday night with no structured activities and no safe place to go.
“I saw hundreds of youth. When I got here, we had youth definitely spiraling out of control,” Norman said Thursday morning. “There were youth that were fighting, and just, you know, kids all over the place.”
Norman said she calmed down some of the teens who were getting aggravated, and even drove some young people home.
“Some of the kids out here, you know, they’re trying to have a good time. They want to gather. They don’t have money. They don’t have the bare necessities to really have a good time,” Norman said, “so you got kids coming down here hopping trains. Just a lot of, you know, chaos.”
Chicago police Supt. Larry Snelling has praised Norman’s work in the past.
Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd) said the mayhem downtown Wednesday night was not an organized teen takeover event like other times. Instead, Hopkins believes the crowd grew from smaller groups who are out of school for spring break.
Hiopkins said at least one person was sent to the hospital from an injury suffered during a fight.
Police said eight teens were arrested. Seven of them, all between 13 and 16 years old, were charged with misdemeanor reckless conduct, and a 16-year-old boy was charged with three felony counts of aggravated assault to peace officers and one misdemeanor count of reckless conduct. That boy also was cited for riding a bicycle on the sidewalk. Another 24 teens were cited for curfew violations, police said.
Hopkins called the situation “out of control,” and said it only calmed down once curfew was ordered.
“When they began making curfew apprehensions, the teens began to leave and started to wind down, so once again, it’s definitive proof that curfews can work,” said Hopkins.
Hopkins has been behind more than one measure that would have introduced snap teen curfews for downtown Chicago.
His first proposal, which allowed just 30 minutes’ notice of temporary teen curfews ordered by police, was vetoed by Mayor Johnson. The mayor said giving officers the right to sweep young people off the street could spark lawsuits and damage the relationship with the community.
A revamped measure introduced in December of last year would allow the Chicago police superintendent to issue a curfew for minors with 12 hours’ notice, after consulting the deputy mayor for community safety. The City Council delayed a vote on that measure in January after last-minute changes.
Hopkins called the current curfew time “arbitrary,” and continued to argue police should have more flexibility to impose a curfew earlier in these kinds of situations.
“If we could’ve enforced the curfew last night at 8 o’clock, when the peak of this teen trend was happening, we could’ve ended it two hours earlier,” he said.
Hopkins said he’s working on a new pitch he hopes the mayor can get behind.
“We are working our way through that, but the message is clear to the mayor. We have to use the curfew as an effective tool to prevent violence,” he said.
This incident happened just days after the mayor fired two key public safety figures in his administration – his deputy mayor for community safety, Garien Gatewood, and his director of violence prevention, Manny Whitfield – giving some reason to wonder what the summer ahead might look like.
Johnson created Gatewood’s position just days after taking office in 2023. Gatewood had been tasked with overseeing the Johnson administration’s efforts to address the root causes of crime and violence in Chicago and coming up with a plan for public safety.
The mayor has not been clear on why he axed those people in those public safety positions, but he has said he is committed to his plan of reducing crime by investing in summer youth jobs programs.
“We’ve had the public safety director fired, we’ve had the director of violence prevention fired, and so we have no leadership,” Norman said. “It’s time for change. It needs to be new voices. We need new leadership.”
The mayor’s office said the dispersal of the crowd downtown and another dispersal on the South Side on Wednesday were done successfully using existing curfew laws, a sign Johnson doesn’t appear ready to budge on his opposition to snap curfews.
More from CBS News
