Teen safety advocate reacts to teen takeover incident in Curtis Hixon Park, suggests solutions

TAMPA, Fla. - Tampa Police arrested 22 young people on Friday night after a teen takeover turned violent in Curtis Hixon Park, and now teen safety advocates are speaking out.

The backstory:

TPD arrested people ages 12-21 on Friday night on charges of affray, possession of narcotics, resisting without violence, and unlawful possession of a weapon after a large hoard of teens met in Curtis Hixon Park.

Officers recovered two guns and narcotics from this scene as well.

These Teen Takeovers are part of a nationwide pattern where kids meet up at a predetermined location and take over the area. In some cases, it is a business and, in this case, it was a park.

Freddy Barton is the executive director of Safe and Sound Hillsborough County. He said teens need an outlet.

What they're saying:

"You know, if kids don't have something to do, they will find something to do," Barton said. "And none of us want that to happen, right?"

He said, with summer quickly approaching, teen programs are more important than ever.

"There are so many summer programs that are getting ready to open up that are going to keep kids busy from the early morning hours to early evening hours," Barton said.

Local perspective:

There are teen programs aimed at keeping kids out of trouble at night.

'PAL’s Midnight Basketball' is organized by the Police Athletic League and 'Stay and Play' is managed by the city.

These programs allow kids to have a safe and supervised outlet to play basketball or legally go to a park at night to play.

"The stay and play programs that are allowing kids to stay up until 10, 11 o'clock at night," Barton said. "That's critical, we want our parents to get involved with that."

What you can do:

He says parents need to play a big part in preventing teen takeovers in the future.

"Our parents need to start talking to our kids," Barton said. "If you see a kid that all of a sudden they were, they were once bright, and they were always so happy and smiling and all of the sudden that they're quiet, you need to talk to your son, your daughter, and find out what's going on."

One parent at Curtis Hixon Park said he goes to this park with his three-year-old a lot.

"I was here four hours prior to that, so it was actually kind of scary thinking about her possibly being around 50 crazy kids fighting," Stephens said.

In a statement, Tampa Police Department Chief Lee Bercaw said, "This type of reckless and criminal behavior will not be tolerated in our city. What began as a large gathering quickly escalated into disorder and activity that placed others at risk. Parents need to know where their children are and who they are with."

"I mean, just being there for their kids; I feel like that's really what it comes down to," Stephens said. "The older they get, you know, they want to go out and have fun, but there's ways you can do that in a healthy way, something that won't affect the community."

"It's not that we adults don't want our kids to have fun," Barton said. "We want them to be able to come home every night safe and sound and not have to worry about being arrested or hurt or otherwise threatened by any other means."

Big picture view:

Another big issue, according to Barton, is the guns.

He wants gun owners to take better precautions to secure their firearms.

"We're still finding that over 80 percent of guns recovered from juveniles are coming from unlocked vehicles," Barton said. "And so, when we look at the number of kids that were arrested and those guns that were recovered from those kids, we know that they stole them."

There is more information about Stay and Play on the Tampa City website, and there is more about the PAL initiatives here.