JUVENILE RAMPAGE DOWNTOWN CONTINUES
Juvenile violence and hijinks continue to plague Downtown Crossing — with kids frightening shoppers just to “mess with people.”
Police rushed to Macy’s department store on 450 Washington Street at around 8:40 p.m. Monday for an assault and battery call.
Upon arrival, a woman with a swollen red eye told officers that a “young black male in a hooded sweatshirt” came up behind her outside the store and hit her in the face with a shoe, according to the police report. EMS came to treat her for her injury.
A sergeant told the responding officers that the group accused in this call were the same group from multiple calls earlier in the day that they were “disturbing customers and being a hindrance to Macy’s staff.”
The woman said the boy who allegedly hit her was in a larger group of males wearing gray hoodies and black jackets and that the group was over by the Downtown Crossing station next to Primark.
The officers headed that way, the report states, when another person came up to report that a different member of the group of boys had jumped on his back.
When questioned, the accused jumper allegedly told the police that his friends were encouraging him to “mess with people” and that he was really trying to play leapfrog with random people on the street: he said he “didn’t jump on anyone” but that he “tried to jump over them,” according to the report.
Police issued summonses to both juveniles — whose names and identifying information have been redacted from the report due to their age — to Boston Juvenile Court. The first was charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon to wit shod foot, and the second was charged with two counts of assault and battery.
After viewing additional video footage from the intersection of Washington and Summer streets, in which the group was allegedly running directly at people to make them jump out of the way and also “swinging their arms in a manner that would cause people to flinch and walk in a manner to try to avoid the group,” Boston Police issued disturbing the peace and trespassing summonses to three boys.
Since the names are redacted, it is unclear if these are three different boys or if one or both of the previously mentioned boys were among the three.
A spokeswoman for the Boston Police Department told the Herald that this is a different group of children than the group featured in earlier reports of violence and mayhem over the last month or so in Downtown Crossing and elsewhere downtown.
Two 13-year-old children were arraigned May 2 and charged in connection to one or more of those previous instances of violence. Those incidents include reports of children attempting to buy alcohol at downtown restaurants and then breaking the windows when refused, to group beating a woman reportedly because she was wearing braids as she walked in Downtown Crossing, to punching a McDonald’s employee in the face in Roxbury.
The ages of the children — with at least one leader in April’s attacks being reported as only 11 years old — make it hard for the city and law enforcement to come up with a response. That’s because of 2018 state criminal justice reform legislation.
“The 2018 reforms take kids under 12 out of the criminal justice system. Previously, kids as young as 7 could be charged criminally,” state Sen. William Brownsberger — a Democrat who represents Back Bay, Fenway, Allston, Brighton, Watertown and Belmont and a chief sponsor of the bill — wrote to the Herald on May 4.
“The right responses for troubled children under 12 are through DCF, the schools, the health care system, and, of course, their parents.”