Uproar in Somerville as public library closes doors in the middle of the day; are ruffians from Somerville High to blame?

The Somerville police have two choices tell the truth and back the librarians or lie and protect the local politicians who are covering up these problems.

Could be...

'We are temporarily modifying the Central Library hours to better understand the needs of our community, and to work towards enhancing the City’s resources and programming to create spaces that provide local teens a place where they feel safe, welcome, and have the opportunity to engage in programming that feels meaningful and exciting for them.'

Perhaps they should shut down the school instead of the library.

Wouldn't it be equally effective — without inconveniencing other library users — just to ban those 30-50 teens?

It's common practice for parents to use public libraries as free after school child care venues. Bored kids can be found in Dedham libraries waiting until their parents get out of work to come pick them up. Every year the kids get a little older and in places like Somerville, they apparently are old enough to go "wilding".

A friend of mine works at the Central branch and has been personal witness to the disruption and chaos the teens cause. The fact that the cops had to be called at all bothers them deeply. According to them, the librarians in the teen area have tried everything to control the behavior, with no luck. Between the weed smoking (yes, it's legal here but it's still unpleasant to be around non-consensually), the fighting, and the overall violence and aggression of this subset of teens, it's made the library an unpleasant place to be for many people, including other teens that are well behaved.

The comments I've seen about this tend to boil down into a few categories:
1) "Where are the parents???" - they're probably working, Presumably either the parents know what their kids are doing and are unable to control them/do not care, or the kids are good at behaving under their watch and then going feral once released. Either way, handwringing about who /else/ should have responsibility for these children is useless.

2) "They should be controlled by the police/why don't they call the cops/why aren't the cops involved" - they've called the cops. Multiple times. As it says in the original post. They haven't been able to do squat. You think having them hang around being useless and scaring patrons who have good reason to be wary of the police is a good idea? Police aren't some kind of anti-chaos scarecrow, and the teens have proven to not be intimidated by them.

3) "The librarians should be doing more to address this" - This is what they're trying to do. All their in-the-moment attempts are clearly failing, so this is them trying to regroup and figure out a new approach and buy themselves some breathing room to think. Expecting librarians to simultaneously handle teen-caused crises as well as serve the better behaved patrons AND create and implement plans to manage the teenage troublemakers is up there with expecting someone to sing opera underwater.