Teens are still the talk of the town, but this time Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens is weighing in.
Dickens sat down with Atlanta Press Club Chair Mike Jordan for a conversation on citywide youth investment at the April 24 APC Newsmaker luncheon, where he covered everything from arts funding to “teen takeovers.”
By all accounts, Dickens is a mayor focused on young people. In 2023,he declared it the “Year of the Youth.” Then he did it again in 2024, and once more in 2025. Each year brought funding and investment for early education, summer jobs and nonprofits.
But helping the youth is no simple task.
“I think we have to get back to meeting kids where they are, and there’s been some push for that,” Dickens opened.
He keeps to major youth success metrics: graduation rates, third-grade reading skills, summer youth employment, suspension and misconduct reductions and shrinking youth violence rates.
On those fronts, Dickens said “things are progressing in the right direction.”
Still, young people are a hot topic. In 2026 “teen takeovers” — unauthorized meetups of hundreds of teenagers in hot spots like the Battery and the Beltline — became the newest problem.
Some takeovers, like the Feb. 28 Beltline affair that ended in 14 arrests, have raised major concern and calls for “what to do about teenagers?”
Answers differ. Some call for stricter curfews and for cops to roam popular hangout spots, asking teenagers why they are there.
Dickens sides with the latter. He opposed moves like the emergency 7 p.m. curfew for minors in Henry County, which he worried would keep young people from jobs or late-night basketball games. They could even be penalized for walking home in the evening.
Instead he focused on resources. He said the arts and third spaces, like after-school programs, “make them feel good and be positive citizens.” It’s the type of issue he worked on with the “years of the youth.”
He added, “It’ll be better for society if we invested in those areas.”
In the mayor’s eyes, it’s already working. He said youth crime rates are dropping and pointed to young people who are doing “self-correction” and conflict resolution on their own time. He wants to add on more dollars to that work through parks and recreation, nonprofit after-school programs and the Mayor’s Office of Violence Reduction.
“What we’re doing is adding a lot more resources on top of the already high amount of resources,” Dickens said. He admitted some things should change, like the 11 p.m. weeknight curfew for minors that may be “too late.” Dickens said he will have a “dialogue with City Council” and teen programmers about the best move forward.
But it isn’t just an Atlanta problem. At the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Dickens said many local leaders were also dealing with teen takeovers. Several takeovers in Georgia happened in the metro area, too.
One recent incident, with “a whole bunch of kids” doing donuts on the edge of the city, ended in several arrests. He said 90 percent of the kids were from Cobb County and Gwinnett County, not Atlanta.
“They weren’t Atlantans, they just did it on Atlanta infrastructure,” Dickens said.
The mayor sees the city as a leader in the cause, but it accounts for only 520,000 of the metro region’s 6.5 million residents. He plans to work with counties and ask: “How are y’all gonna help your teens?”
“This stuff is a metro solution, which is one of the nuances I really think the media has to pay attention to.”
