For the second time in recent months, a gang of teenagers in Philadelphia (and by gang we mean more than 100) decided to go out into Center City and have fun by physically attacking passers by. First, for these kids, when did punching strangers in the face at random become a leisure time activity?

But more to the point. This had happened before. The Gallery security knew what would happen if they roistered this teens from the mall. Did they not notify the police that this was going on? If not, why not? If so, why were the police so woefully unprepared to deal with this again?

And now, the police say they are looking into ways to prevent it from happening again. Really? Still looking into it? Do we have to wait until someone is killed (because we know from the experience of the Starbucks manager murdered by a small group of teens that a punch can kill) before the police take this seriously enough to actually prepare to defend against it?

They are considering monitoring social networking sites. Really? After the previous Gallery exodus attacks and the South and Broad miniriot organized on Twitter, they are still just considering?

And by the way, I’m more in favor of keeping these miscreants IN school, perhaps until dinner time, rather than leaving them out so they can roam unsupervised all day. The Starbucks attackers were truants. We really don’t need more bored kids using innocent shoppers and commuters as funtime targets.

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