Douglasville’s police chief says there will be consequences for teenagers found to have acted criminally during a brawl inside Arbor Place Mall last weekend. And he wants parents to know they bear some responsibility for allowing their children to be in potentially troublesome situations.
Chief Gary Sparks says a lot of kids showed-up at a three-dollar movie night at the mall’s theatre, when a fight turned into a melee. “Some of them may have been speaking of a gun, and then people started stampeding, then you’ve got some kids sitting back videoing the fight and throwing it on Tik Tok and trying to get these views,” Sparks tells WSB Radio.
He says his department is going through the videos and is likely to bring charges against several teens – perhaps 10 or more - for what happened in the brawl.
The weekend fight moved Chief Sparks to have his department post a message on Facebook mainly directed at parents. “In this age of social media, there are young people whose mindsets are trending toward gangs or criminally addictive thinking. There are those who do things for attention to see how many “likes” they can get when they post video, whether it be fighting, creating an uproar in a crowd of people…,” part of the post reads.
Sparks tells WSB, “(a parent) should understand as an adult, there’s going to be a lot of kids there and when a lot of kids get around sometimes things get out of whack. It doesn’t take but a second. It’s (parents’) responsibility. They had them, it’s their kids, it’s their responsibility. And the mall is not there to raise your kids,” Sparks says.
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