Teen takeover arrests should remind us that the US is far too punitive
I haven't been a teenager for a long time, and am also not yet the parent of one, so I admit I'm not familiar with a lot of details of the whole "teen takeover" phenomenon. But the news articles I've seen about it paint it as inherently dangerous that teenagers are organizing events online where they... go to the beach? Really? The actual impact on others is vague and implicit, and really just comes off as cops scaremongering over the grave public threat of people existing in public. It sounds like the vast majority of the people attending these things aren't bothering anyone.
The majority, but not all. So what's up with the participants who have been making problems? Well, there were some criminal charges for fighting and drunk driving at the takeovers I've seen hit the news. Those do physically endanger other people, so yes, someone should step in to stop them, but the US really needs to stop its one-size-fits-all idea that public order requires prosecution.
I think that, most of the time, things like fights should be dealt with in the "real world" the way they were dealt with by school authorities when I was a kid: break up the fight, interview the people involved to figure out what was going on, tell them to stay away from each other, maybe suspension. But we give out punishments measured in years, not days, and hold it against people for their whole lives, branding them "criminals" as if that's their personality instead of a situational bad idea or an actual interpersonal conflict with a specific other person.
In high school, I got into a fight on the bus. Nobody was arrested, nobody was prosecuted, instead the school identified and interviewed everyone involved, and when confronted again by the specific person I was fighting, I told him that I had jumped in to protect someone else without knowing how it had started, and he said that he had too and we went on our way peacefully respecting each other and understanding that we actually had no personal conflict at all. I want other people to get that kind of opportunity to resolve their problems.