Juveniles accounted for almost half of all robbery arrests on Metro so far this year, and transit police continue to struggle with rowdy and sometimes violent children who congregate at stations after school.
Metro arrested or cited juveniles in 239 incidents during the last school year, including 53 assaults, 39 cases of disorderly behavior and 27 robberies.
The youths were carrying weapons in 15 of those cases.
School starts Aug. 25 in the District of Columbia.
“Our leading problem has been assaults and fights among [the juveniles] and in some cases against our customers,” Metro Transit Police Lieutenant Greg Hanna said.
Since January, Metro has arrested 16 juveniles on robbery charges out of 33 robbery arrests.
Transit police issued youths 2,365 warning notices over the 2007-2008 school year for a myriad of violations, accounting for almost half of the 5,262 warnings handed out in the transit system during that period.
D.C. public school students can ride Metro to and from school at a city-subsidized rate and tend to congregate outside stations or on station platforms in the afternoons, officials said.
The Anacostia, Minnesota Avenue and Gallery Place Metro stations — all stations that have several schools and thousands of students feeding into them daily — consistently see the greatest instances of disruptive behavior, Hanna said.
Tenleytown, which draws students from Woodrow Wilson Senior High School and Deal Junior High School, is also a problem area, residents have said.
“There have been a spate of complaints at the Tenleytown station about customers being subject to intimidation, having access blocked or even in one case spitting on riders,” Ward 3 Council Member Mary Cheh told Transit Police Chief Michael Taborn at an April council hearing.
“I’ve even had some people say they will not use that stop at certain points during the day,” she said.
Tenleytown resident Steve Cherrington reported being knocked over by a youth who “body blocked” him outside of that station, eliciting laughter and high-fives from his classmates.
“I was quite shaken and a bit unsteady but struggled onto my feet and thought the better part of valor at age 57 was to get away from there as quickly as I could,” he said to an online discussion group about the issue. “I had no idea what their next after-school activity was going to be.”
Transit police, in conjunction with D.C. police, deploy six-officer juvenile details to problem stations between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. on school days, Hanna said.
“We tend to put the same officers in some of the problem areas,” he said. “There is an advantage because they’ve developed a rapport with some of the students.”
After a juvenile receives three warnings from police, Metro sends a notice to his or her school and parents.
“We’ve seen the schools do anything from suspend the kid to even involuntary transfer to another school,” Hanna said.
Police also have worked with school principals to set up special assemblies and roundtable discussions about loitering and horseplay at Metro stations, Hanna said.
“Some of the feedback we’ve gotten is just the stigma of law enforcement in general and not wanting to talk to law enforcement,” he said. “They also want to hang out a little bit, and they don’t see that there’s anything wrong with hanging out at the station if they’re not doing anything wrong.”
The combined efforts may be helping, Hanna said.
The 239 arrests or citations of juveniles this school year were 31 fewer than the year before, he said.
