BY NOAH VELASQUEZ

Recently, there was an incident at the Westfield shopping mall in Culver City, where there was a false report about a gunman in the mall. As a result, the report gained a huge response from the local police department in hopes to prevent a tragic event. Instead, the police department came across over two hundred teenagers, most of whom were fighting outside the mall. It was total chaos and took a long time to sort everything out. The police department later found out that this whole situation was planned on social media in hopes to cause a scene.

This isn’t the first incident involving young adolescents at a mall, and it definitely won’t be the last. Due to incidents like this, shopping malls have begun to set curfews and bans on unaccompanied minors on Friday and Saturday nights because those are the days when young teenagers are out and probably doing something they shouldn’t. However, despite the fact that there is probably going to be some teenagers who are going to misbehave and often times act foolish at a local shopping center, it should not lead to a ban of minors altogether for the actions of a select few.

Putting a ban on unaccompanied minors because of the actions of some teenagers is basically stereotyping how every teen in the world is going to misbehave at a mall when that is not the case. Most teenagers go to the mall to either shop at a place that has several of their favorite stores or to eat at the food court; either way, most (if not all) teenagers do not just go to the mall to cause a scene or create havoc.

I feel that in no way there should be a ban and/or a curfew for teenagers because it is a public place and they have every right to be there with or without a parent. However, I also feel they should not abuse this right and should act as responsible as they can be, showing respect to everyone who works at that particular mall. In my opinion, the only way to fix this conflict is to have faith and trust that most teenagers won’t have the urge to create chaos at malls.

Ultimately, there is no way to know for sure whether or not teenagers are going to act up in certain situations, but banning all teenagers falls into stereotyping and is not okay. The reason this is such a big issue for me is because it is taking away people’s rights, and eventually other malls will begin to consider this rule and begin to create more chaos and more controversy. Overall, I feel this rule should not be implemented at any malls because it seems like it would just create more problems rather than be a solution. There is no real solution to this issue other than having faith that young kids won’t continue to act out.