By Reginal Campbell · August 13, 2026 · 9-minute read

The Story Chicago Keeps Starting in the Middle

Chicago just had its safest Memorial Day weekend in a decade, and it still can’t explain why the same crowds keep showing up in the same places.

Chicago got through Memorial Day weekend, 2026, without a single shooting homicide, the first time that had happened in at least a decade.

It also wasn’t peace. The city still recorded 23 shooting incidents and 36 shooting victims that weekend.[1] In Hyde Park and on the Near West Side, large teen gatherings spilled into violence and disorder. Near Roosevelt and Loomis, prosecutors say an 18-year-old driver deliberately drove into five police officers trying to break up an after-prom crowd that had gotten out of hand.[2] Three officers went to the hospital. Police found a gun in his car.

Days before the weekend, Chicago’s police superintendent had already tried to warn parents what these nights can cost. “They’re vulnerable, you know, when they go into these environments,” Larry Snelling said. “They can be harmed, and they can be killed, and that has happened.”[3]

This is where the story usually starts and stops. The crowds. The fights. The damaged property. The frightened residents. The police response. Alderman Brian Hopkins is once again pushing to toughen the curfew law and put parents on the hook for violations. It is not the first time. It will not be the last.

Those instincts aren’t wrong. People should be able to walk through the Loop, sit on the lakefront, run a business, or drive home without being assaulted or watching their windshield get stomped in. A 16-year-old girl was charged with a weapons offense after one Hyde Park gathering in March. A woman was shot in the arm near Streeterville that same month. A 15-year-old boy was shot weeks later in the same neighborhood.[4] In 2022, 16-year-old Seandell Holliday was killed steps from Cloud Gate during a takeover in Millennium Park.[5] In November 2025, two separate shootings followed the city’s Christmas tree-lighting ceremony downtown, leaving 14-year-old Armani Floyd dead and eight other teenagers wounded.[6] None of that is incidental. Teenagers who assault people, carry weapons, or destroy property should answer for it, and their victims deserve more than a footnote in this conversation.

But accountability isn’t the same thing as pretending the behavior fell out of the sky. And on the one question that actually matters, what stops this from happening again, the city keeps reaching for the answer its own evidence doesn’t support.

That is a systems failure. When an institution keeps producing the same outcome, the first question should be what sits upstream of it. Look at the structure producing that outcome before spending more money enforcing it. Leaders navigating this territory, especially Black leaders, are often pushed to skip that first question entirely.

The curfew Chicago already has

Here’s what gets lost in every one of these debates: Chicago already has a 10 p.m. curfew. It’s been on the books since 2022. Millennium Park has barred unaccompanied minors after 6 p.m. for just as long, a restriction put in place after Holliday’s killing.[5] Police used both in March, and it worked, for that night. The crowd thinned within forty minutes.

Hopkins has spent more than a year trying to give police more room to work than that. The City Council passed his first version, a “snap curfew” allowing officers to declare curfews anywhere in the city with 30 minutes’ notice, in June 2025.[7] Mayor Johnson vetoed it, Chicago’s first mayoral veto since 2006. An override attempt fell six votes short.[8]

After the tree-lighting shootings that killed Floyd, Hopkins returned in December with a revised proposal requiring 12 hours’ notice.[9] It cleared committee in January, but he changed it again before the expected floor vote, and the council held the measure. As of August 6, 2026, it has never received a final up-or-down vote.[10]

Floyd was killed several blocks outside Millennium Park’s curfew zone. That does not prove the 6 p.m. restriction directly failed. But it illustrates the limits of a location-specific boundary: it may disperse a crowd without reducing the underlying risk.

Then it happened again. Streeterville in February. The Loop in March. Hyde Park and the Near West Side in May.

A curfew that has to be enforced again every few weeks isn’t a solution. It’s a mop. And the research backs that up more bluntly than most people arguing about it seem to realize. The most rigorous review of the evidence, a Campbell Collaboration systematic analysis of twelve studies, found no significant effect of juvenile curfews on crime or victimization.[11] Kenneth Adams’s landmark survey of the literature found that three out of four tested relationships between curfews and crime showed nothing at all.[12] Most of that research is old, drawn from ordinances passed in the 1990s and 2000s, and it deserves an update for the social-media era. But right now, the alderpeople pushing for tougher curfews are leaning on confidence the evidence itself doesn’t have.

Mayor Johnson has said as much, if for different reasons: “Working to relocate or displace the problem is not how we solve the problem.” He’s right about the mechanism. His critics are right that his alternative has gone underfunded for years.

Where the story actually starts

The story didn’t begin on Michigan Avenue. Part of it began years earlier, in decisions that appeared to have nothing to do with downtown.

In 2013, the Chicago Board of Education approved the closure or phaseout of 50 schools and programs, the largest mass school-closing action in the country’s history at the time. It displaced 13,646 children. Eighty-nine percent of them were Black, in a district where Black students made up 41 percent of enrollment.[13] The city promised those kids better schools. University of Chicago researchers found that reading losses eventually recovered, but negative math effects persisted through the final year of the study, four years out.[14] Neighborhoods that lost a school lost population three times faster than similar neighborhoods that didn’t. Over the years that followed, roughly a third of the displaced kids left the district altogether. Ten years later, more than half the shuttered buildings, 26 of 46, still sit empty.[13]

Those buildings are not just eyesores. A 2026 study out of the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins found that gun violence rose 10 percent in the neighborhoods around the ones that stayed vacant, compared to similar blocks that never lost a school.[15] “These communities deserve an apology for the chaos and the disinvestment in them,” said Demetrius Hobson, the former principal of one shuttered West Side school, standing in front of its boarded windows.

None of this means a specific teenager in a specific crowd downtown grew up around a specific closed school. They’re not one population with one story. But the pattern is the point: Chicago keeps pulling institutions and investment out of Black neighborhoods, then acts baffled when the instability that follows shows up somewhere the city would rather not see it. The children displaced when Overton, Henson, Lafayette, and dozens of other schools closed are now teenagers and young adults. The consequences of those decisions did not disappear when the buildings were boarded up.

The programs capable of providing some of the structure, employment, mentorship, and intervention these neighborhoods need have spent the years since fighting for their own survival. BUILD, which has run violence-intervention work on the West Side for 56 years, is staring down the loss of up to $4.5 million in federal funding, a fifth of its budget,[16] on top of a $2.5 million state grant jeopardized when Washington withdrew the federal funding supporting it in January.[17] More than 1,500 youth jobs across the city, including Chicago Youth Service Corps positions held by Humboldt Park teenagers helping their own families pay rent, disappeared at the end of 2024 when the money ran out.[18] The Justice Department canceled another $3.7 million in grants to Chicago violence-prevention groups last year.[19] The Park District’s 2026 budget quietly admits where the gap is, steering $5 million toward “deferred maintenance” specifically on the South and West Sides, a budget line acknowledging what got neglected first.

And here’s the part that should embarrass the city most: where Chicago has invested heavily in youth employment, its own early numbers point in a more promising direction. The neighborhoods with the most Chicago Youth Works hires last year also saw double-digit drops in shootings and homicides.[20] One year of data doesn’t prove employment caused the decline. But the same city funding curfew enforcement has not scaled up a strategy its own numbers suggest deserves expansion and rigorous evaluation.

What “takeover” gets wrong, and what it doesn’t

The word matters. A takeover implies the people showing up don’t belong there. But downtown, the parks, the beaches, the lakefront: those belong to Black teenagers too. Eighteen-year-old Damarion Spann put the double standard plainly. Walk into a mall with his Black friends and shoppers stare, security tails him. Walk in with white friends and, in his words, “I feel like I belong.”[21] Local reporters have documented the same concern from residents and advocates: that the city’s curfew enforcement falls overwhelmingly on Black teenagers.[22]

That context is real. It doesn’t make “takeover” simply wrong, though, when the outcome is a pedestrian beaten unconscious, a crowd sprayed with mace, a car with its windshield caved in. One Hyde Park resident’s car took roughly a thousand dollars in damage in March. He’s not wrong to be angry, and the word isn’t the injustice in that sentence. The label carries a racial charge worth scrutinizing. The violence is also real. Neither fact cancels the other out.

The question underneath the question

Chicago keeps asking how to stop teenagers from taking over downtown. It’s the easier question. It has an easier-sounding answer: more curfew, more enforcement, more consequences for parents.

The harder question is what Chicago has built for young people outside these nights of disruption. In too many neighborhoods, the school closed. The recreation center reduced its hours. The nonprofit running the after-school program is reviewing another budget cut. The job that provided structure and income disappeared when the funding ended.

None of this excuses assault, weapon possession, or destroying someone’s property. Explanation is not absolution. But Chicago cannot spend ten years closing schools disproportionately in Black neighborhoods, watch violence-prevention funding get cut at organizations trying to reach young people before they end up downtown, enforce a curfew unsupported by strong evidence of lasting effectiveness, and then act shocked when a generation capable of organizing instantly through social media shows up in the part of the city where investment remains most visible. That’s not a strategy. It’s managing the symptom while refusing to look at the disease.

There’s a real signal here, and it points away from curfews. The neighborhoods that got the most youth jobs also saw the sharpest drops in shootings. That’s not proof. Other things moved at the same time, policing changes, broader crime trends, other investments. But it’s a pattern worth funding at scale and testing rigorously, not overselling and not ignoring. Chicago is reaching for punitive measures backed by evidence that’s decades old and mostly inconclusive, while one of its biggest opportunity-based bets is showing results promising enough to deserve real money and real study. That’s the argument the city should be having.

Black leaders are often expected to prove their seriousness by condemning the visible disorder without spending too much time on the conditions behind it. They are pushed to distance themselves from the communities associated with the disruption and call that distance strength. But naming institutional failure is not the same as excusing individual harm. It is the work required to prevent the next incident rather than merely denounce the last one. Strong leadership should be able to hold both truths without being forced to choose between them.

Teenagers are responsible for the harm they cause. The city is responsible for the conditions it keeps creating and refuses to fix. Both are true on the same night, in the same crowd, at the same intersection.

Sources

  1. ABC7 Chicago, Washington Times, and Fox 32 Chicago, Memorial Day weekend reporting confirming 23 shooting incidents, 36 shooting victims, and no confirmed shooting homicides, the first such weekend in at least a decade, May 26, 2026. ↑

  2. Block Club Chicago, “5 Officers Struck By Driver As Neighbors Decry ‘Chaotic’ Teen Gathering On Near West Side”, May 25, 2026. ↑

  3. CBS News Chicago, “CPD Supt. Larry Snelling says parents should play bigger role in stopping ‘teen takeovers,’” May 20, 2026. ↑

  4. WTTW News, “Teen Takeover Raises Questions About Public Safety, Spaces for Young People,” March 31, 2026. ↑

  5. WTTW News, “Ban on Unaccompanied Minors in Millennium Park After 6 P.M. Takes Effect”, May 19, 2022. ↑ ↑

  6. WTTW News, “Fundraiser Launched After Teen Killed in Downtown Shooting Friday”, November 24, 2025. Two separate shootings followed the tree-lighting ceremony; Armani Floyd, 14, died in the second, and eight other teenagers were wounded across both. ↑

  7. WTTW News, “City Council Votes 27-22 to Allow CPD to Declare ‘Snap Curfews’ to Stop Teen Gatherings; Mayor Says He’ll Veto”, June 18, 2025. ↑

  8. CBS News Chicago, “City Council upholds Mayor Brandon Johnson’s veto of ‘snap curfew’ ordinance”. The override fell six votes short of the 34 needed. ↑

  9. CBS News Chicago, “Ald. Brian Hopkins introduced revamped teen curfew measure for Chicago’s downtown”. The revised proposal advanced out of committee 10-4 on January 7, 2026. ↑

  10. Chicago Councilmatic, legislative record for Ordinance SO2025-0021898. Last recorded action is “Substituted,” January 21, 2026, with no subsequent floor vote as of this writing. ↑

  11. Wilson, Gill, Olaghere, and McClure, “Juvenile Curfew Effects on Criminal Behavior and Victimization: A Systematic Review”, Campbell Systematic Reviews, 2016. The review synthesizes 12 quantitative studies of official juvenile curfew ordinances. Most of the underlying studies examine ordinances from the 1990s and 2000s. ↑

  12. Adams, Kenneth, “The Effectiveness of Juvenile Curfews at Crime Prevention,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2003. ↑

  13. Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ, “Chicago closed 50 public schools 10 years ago. Did the city keep its promises?”, May 18, 2023. Source of the 13,646-student, 89-percent-Black, and 26-of-46-buildings figures, and the population-decline comparison between tracts with and without closed schools. ↑ ↑

  14. University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, “School Closings in Chicago: Staff and Student Experiences and Academic Outcomes,” May 2018. Reading effects recovered within the study period; negative math effects persisted through the fourth and final year measured. ↑

  15. WBEZ and Chicago Sun-Times, “Shootings increased near Chicago’s closed schools that sat empty, study finds”, June 15, 2026, reporting a University of Chicago / Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health study. Source of the Demetrius Hobson quote. ↑

  16. City Bureau, “How Chicago’s Youth Programs Continue Their Work and Fight for Funding”, December 10, 2025. ↑

  17. Austin Weekly News, “BUILD navigates federal funding whiplash,” January 16, 2026, on the $2.5 million state grant terminated after federal funding behind it was withdrawn. ↑

  18. CBS News Chicago, “Hundreds of Chicago youth will lose their jobs by end of year due to funding cuts”. Jobs ended December 31, 2024; program organizers estimated more than 1,500 positions affected citywide. ↑

  19. CBS News Chicago, “Chicago anti-violence groups losing $3.7 million in federal funding after Justice Department cuts grants,” 2025. ↑

  20. City of Chicago, “Mayor Brandon Johnson, DFSS Announce Rebranded ‘Chicago Youth Works,’” March 2026. Hiring and shooting-decline figures are city-reported, not independently audited; the correlation is directional evidence, not established causation. ↑

  21. ABC7 Chicago and the Associated Press, “How social media ‘teen takeover’ trend took a serious turn,” 2026. Source of the Damarion Spann quote. ↑

  22. Axios Chicago, “Chicago curfew debate clashes with low downtown enforcement data”, February 9, 2026. ↑

About the author

Reginal Campbell writes about enterprise technology, AI governance, leadership, and the systems organizations build to make consequential decisions.

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