Perhaps it’s because it was an otherwise slow Saturday night. Perhaps it’s because of the recent spate of violent incidents in public venues across the country. Whatever the reason, the story of the melee that broke out Saturday evening in the food court of the Mall of Louisiana involving some 200 local teens went viral and topped the list of trending stories for much of Sunday on websites such as Yahoo! News and Google.
While there’s no way to do damage control in the age of social media, local law enforcement and elected officials are grappling with how to prevent such incidents from happening again in the future. There’s no clear-cut solution.
Metro Councilman Chandler Loupe, who tried unsuccessfully in 2011 to pass an ordinance that would have applied the existing 11 p.m. curfew to 17-year-olds, says he still favors a curfew as a potential solution. But a curfew wouldn’t have made any difference Saturday night: The fight broke out in the early evening, and many of the kids involved were too young to drive anyway.
Councilman Joel Boé suggests that parents shouldn’t “use mall cops and store workers as babysitters.” But as a practical matter, District Attorney Hillar Moore III says it would be legally impossible to ban unattended minors from a shopping center.
“Unfortunately, it’s not the kind of thing you can legislate away,” Moore says. “It’s more the responsibility of parents to know where their kids are and what they’re doing.”
East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff Sid Gautreaux is also calling on parents to be more vigilant about what their children are up to. The fight Saturday reportedly broke out among a large group of teens who had gathered in response to a posting on the social media site Instagram.
“We are asking parents to talk to their children about responding to random Internet posts, to be aware of who they are meeting up with and to be cautious of their surroundings,” Gautreaux says.
Today’s poll question: Does Saturday’s incident at the Mall of Louisiana make you any less likely to visit the mall?
