Young people are organising fight clubs at school and have already been banned from entering a shopping centre after more than a thousand caused a mass disturbance requiring riot police recently.

Fights in the corridors, attacks on teachers and even „fight clubs” organised by students are everyday occurrences in the US’s most violent high school, where some of the faculty are already begging for the National Guard to rein in campus chaos, the New York Post reports.

Overwhelmed teachers fearing for their own safety at Brockton High School, 25 miles south of Boston, were more likely to turn a blind eye to the violence after several staff members were brutally beaten by students while trying to stop a brawl.

„Out of boredom the kids are setting up fights between two individuals, and they’re setting up a location for them to fight, and everybody’s going to watch it,”

said Jamal Gooding, a Brockton, Massachusetts, activist who has been speaking with parents and students to mitigate the situation. Gooding told The Post that those fights are sparking even more violence in the hallways — and risk turning deadly.

„What happens when you lose the fight and you go to school next day? That’s when you let your friends come in the back door and get the person that beat you up,” he said, pointing out that „they’re not dealing with fisticuff fights, like we did in our generation. No, if you lose, now you want to go to weapons.”

Cliff Canavan, a math teacher at Brockton High School who suffered a broken arm when he tried to intervene in a fight last year, said brawls in the hallways are a daily occurrence. At the time an unconscious student was being kicked in the head. Since then, the violence has escalated to the point where his fellow teachers no longer try to step in.

„If I’m in the hallway and a fight breaks out, I don’t get involved. I turn around and go the other way. Because I don’t want to put myself in a situation where I get seriously hurt again,” he said.

Canavan’s injury is just one in a long line of injuries suffered by teachers in Brockton.

 

„A friend of mine that was a science teacher… he had a fight break out in front of his classroom several years back. And he got knocked to the ground and hit his head so hard that he actually wound up with internal damage in his brain. He will never be able to work again as a teacher (…) never be able to drive a car again. He walks around with those deep, deep tinted sunglasses, because if he doesn’t he winds up with splitting headaches from regular light. That’s horrific,” Canavan said.

Another teacher ruptured three disks in his back when he was knocked over breaking up a fight, and was put out of work for the entire year. A hall proctor who was seven months pregnant was shoved into a wall by a student she was escorting for discipline.

During an emergency school committee meeting in February, Canavan and a number of other teachers described the chaos they face on a daily basis in Brockton High. They said students were fighting, dealing and doing drugs, and, according to one teacher, „having sex” in empty classrooms.

Recent budget shortfalls and layoffs have left the school severely understaffed. Those who remain are powerless to maintain order, he said.

In a desperate measure, four members of the Brockton School Committee formally asked the Mayor of Brockton and Governor Maura Healey to dispatch troops from the National Guard to quell the trouble.

Healey declined to send in the Guard, instead allocating funds for a safety audit, but Canavan said the move was „incredibly effective” in making people look at the problem. Now they may bring in community volunteers to try to improve the situation, as most people are against the deployment of the National Guard.

The Brockton High School’s student body is 61 per cent black, 18 per cent Hispanic and 13 per cent white. „There’s a lot of distrust within the community, with anybody with a gun,” Brockton activist Jamal Gooding said, referring to both police and members of the Guard.

Despite the grisly headlines surrounding Brockton High, Canavan and Gooding both emphasised that the vast majority of students do not pose a problem.

“The negativity that’s been happening around Brockton should not overshadow the huge success we have with a lot of those students, and producing some great graduates that go off to college, or trade school,” Canavan said, noting that 95% of the students are “great kids that do the right thing on a regular basis.”

“We’re trying to do what’s right for them, because they deserve it,”

he said, noting that while the troubles go unresolved, more and more of those good kids are continuing to leave the school every year.

Young people banned from shopping centre

Following a huge brawl last December, a new age restriction has been introduced at a shopping mall in the Los Angeles area. On Fridays and Saturdays, youth under 18 are prohibited from entering the premises unchaperoned after 3pm. The accompanying adult must be at least 21 years of age and must remain with the minor for the duration after that time. If this is not possible, the minor must leave the premises.

Del Amo Fashion Center takes decisive action to curb violence and chaos by banning unaccompanied minors from the mall premises. Will this measure succeed in restoring safety and tranquility to the shopping center? #SafetyFirst #CommunitySecurity pic.twitter.com/DenaW3Trzt

— Emily Thompson (@thompson_emily) March 2, 2024

The Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance, California, decided on the move to stop the violence.

In the mass disturbance involving more than a thousand young people last December, five people were arrested and three – among them a police officer – were injured.

The incident eventually spread to 30 shops inside the mall, and was only contained after the Torrance riot police were called in, Fox LA News reported.

 

Among the juveniles arrested three were girls and two were boys.

It is not known what led to the unleashed chaos, but as with the school violence, it is increasingly common that young people are bored and want to attract attention on social media by engaging in such extreme behaviour.

Apparently, this was the motivation behind the two Californian teenagers who broke into an NBA arena under construction and bragged about it on TikTok.

The two youngsters broke into the unfinished NBA arena in the middle of the night and even shot hoops for the world and outraged local authorities to see on social media.

According to the video clip, the youth entered the Intuit Dome, the future home of the Clippers in Inglewood, California, by climbing up a work ladder outside the construction site. The brazen duo were filmed walking through the empty stadium’s corridors and bleachers, then shooting basketballs on an unfinished court.

The video also shows one of them wearing Los Angeles Lakers pants, landing a few buckets and using a fire extinguisher to spray the court.

Their faces are clearly visible in the video, and they had the lack of foresight to name their post „Sneaking into Clippers stadium” .

The teenagers have since been identified by police, who also reported that there were no particular signs of vandalism. However, it is not yet known whether they will be charged with trespassing – a misdemeanour in California.

There are several videos on TikTok of young people breaking into sports facilities, even in broad daylight, which seems to be a new trend.

In a video published in July 2023, young people made their way onto the field at Sofi Stadium, and in another video published in August, the same teenagers sneak into Dodgers Stadium and film themselves on the field – this time in broad daylight.