http://www.masslive.com/news/republican/index.ssf?/base/news-0/1121586748316330.xml&coll=1

Here is some background on the above story.  It's a story not unique to this region.  I've heard of similar policies implented elsewhere in the country, including at he Mall of the Americas, the biggest shopping mall in the U.S., at Minneapolis, Minn.
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Pioneer Valley, Western Massachusetts--

The Holyoke Mall at Ingleside has been a teen magnet for twenty-five years.  The story is familiar to all by now.  Three-level shopping malls started popping up around the country in the 1970s, seducing consumers with one-stop shopping, meterless parking, and that heavenly artificial environment.
In the mall it never rains, it's never cold, the sun never sears your flesh in July.  In these shopping paradises, there are no honking car horns, no trashy sidewalks, no winos, no malodorous fumes, no clocks.  There are just spacious walkways, beautiful atria, fountains, and greenery.
One problem--downtown commercial districts died.  Cities such as Springfield, Chicopee, and especially Holyoke, were already on the wane.  The glory days of industry dying out by the mid-1970s, the cities looked tired, tattered, and saggy.  Plant closings, layoffs, and "white-flight" gave these little towns an atmosphere of disease.  The shopping districts still gave you what you wanted, but  now you felt uneasy there.
The malls, however, were novel and fun.  Who likes things novel and fun better than teenagers?  Flash ahead ten years.  The term "mallrat" is part of the pop culture lexicon.  Cities got more dangerous, governments divested in the public sector, and nobody wanted to hang out around the streets and the parks.  All the kids come to the mall.  Some have money to spend, some don't.
Flash ahead another ten years.  The cities of Springfield and Chicopee are struggleing to create a downtown renaissance.  Museums, theaters, boutiques, and bodegas don't interest teens.  The shops for cool clothes, music, electronics, and accessories are still at the mall.  Add to that the fact that the city in which Ingleside is located, Holyoke, has had no renaissance at all.  Holyoke has rotted into frightening post-apocalyptic-looking squalor and even gangbanger kids fear for their lives out there.

So now you find them all at the mall.  Particularly on weekend nights, good consumer citizens feel menaced by knots of ethnic youths loitering, roughousing, and raising a din.  Shopkeepers fear theft, and loss of paying customers due to the ruffians that abound.

Finally mall management makes the leap.  They're requiring youths below the age eighteen to be accompanied by a parent or guardian.  The policy is called "MB 18," ("Must Be," I presume), and will only be in effect Fridays and Saturdays between 4:00 PM and closing time.
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I have my own opinions on this matter, but I would first like to know if malls nearby you have tried similar measures.  Has it worked?  Willl it work at the Holyoke Mall?  Is it fair?  Is it enforcable?  What do you think?

Well, that's kind of a tough question if you look at both sides of the issue... here in the San Jose area, we have six malls.  Only one, Eastridge Mall, has a "loitering problem", and it has been losing popularity in a big way.  The nearest mall to Eastridge, recently went through a major makeover/remodel and no longer attracts loiterers.  So now, Eastridge is following their lead, and they are remodeling too.  Hopefully this solves the problem, because if it doesn't, Eastridge will probably go out of business.  People can just as easily drive an extra 10 minutes to the next mall, which doesn't have loiterers.

I don't necessarily think keeping teens out is the answer... but think about it... if you went into a restaurant, sat down, and didn't order anything, that wouldn't be right... so why should people be able to hang out in a mall without buying anything?  Maybe there should be a designated area for people to just "hang out" that won't interfere with people who are shopping?  An arcade, maybe?  Or an indoor skate park?

Some form of dress code might help too.

Most shopping malls (centres, as we call them) have security guards.  The shopping centre closest to us even has a police office and there are always police around if you need them.  Any sign of trouble and people are shown the door.

I see the mall management's POV, too.  I just have a visceral reaction against discrimination against the many because of the behavior of the few.  When I was a kid, I never had any trouble, I mean I'd buy a couple of records, play some video games and hang out at the food court.  We never made any trouble beyond the rent-a-cop telling us not to sit on the walls of the rampways.  Oh, once we got kicked out of Friendly's for making too much noise!

The sleaziest characters I've seen at the mall have been 18+.  Those are the guys I suspect are dealing drugs and stuff in there.  How are they going to prove who is a parent or legal guardian?  Are they going to make parents cough up I.D., custodial papers, I mean WTF? 
Then some fifteen year olds look twenty-five and some twenty-five year olds look fifteen.  Speaking as a guy who got carded for liquor until his late twenties, I would have gotten pretty irritated with mall cops asking me for I.D.
I can see agitators playing the race card.  Suppose certain kids accuse mall security of hassling them, but leaving clean cut white kids alone?

I remember way back in high school there was a McDonald's right across the street.  The kids used to hang out there for hours, smoking and loitering.  There weren't many places for kids to hang out in suburbia.  I got p*ssed when they started throwing everybody out at 3:00, and they tried to throw me out.  I didn't hang out with the troublemakers.  I always ordered from the counter and sat quietly with a friend or two, or maybe just read a book.  I brought my case to the store manager.  Fortunately he was a nice guy and exempted me from the policy. 

Part of our problem is our entire society is built around the consumer.  Some kids do extracurricular or church-related activities in the PM, but most have no place to go otherwise.  In some countries, such as Holland, there's a more communitarian mentality and they're big on youth centers where kids can just hang out.  In strip-mall America, they cater to upper-income people, and everyone else go can scr*w themselves, especially kids!

I think alot of teens "look like trouble" and alot don't.  I agree with Maxwell that all the teens shouldn't have to pay for the actions of a few.  For example, it's three weeks before prom and there are groups of girls in the mall shopping for gowns.  No problem.  A group of guys with their baseball caps on backwards, tattoos, tank tops, baggy shorts... problem.

This is where I think a dress code might help..

Maxwell does your mall have anything in it that caters to teens?  Like an arcade or anything?  What would you think if loitering was limited to a certain area of the mall that caters to teens, an area that would likely be of no interest to adult consumers??

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I think you're setting yourself up with that one

We don't have to worry about loiterers at our mall. We just have to worry about dodging bullets. :-X

And the gunmen weren't teenagers, trust me. :P

Our local Mall implemented their policy in Sept. 2003, but it's MB-16. When the local news was covering the story, they talked to some parents who admitted to using the mall as a babysitter for their teens, which was obvious if you ever shopped there. Here's a link to their site with their policy.
http://dayton.mallfinder.com/go/Poolb.cfm?MallID=691&FPURLID=2129954308

I think alot of teens "look like trouble" and alot don't.  I agree with Maxwell that all the teens shouldn't have to pay for the actions of a few.  For example, it's three weeks before prom and there are groups of girls in the mall shopping for gowns.  No problem.  A group of guys with their baseball caps on backwards, tattoos, tank tops, baggy shorts... problem.

This is where I think a dress code might help..

Maxwell does your mall have anything in it that caters to teens?  Like an arcade or anything?  What would you think if loitering was limited to a certain area of the mall that caters to teens, an area that would likely be of no interest to adult consumers??

A lot of the stores in every mall cater to teens.  The problem is we have made our society based on consumerism.  There just aren't a lot of places kids can just hang out.  I wasn't a "mall rat" when I was a kid, but I used to buy clothes and records and hang out.  That's what the food court and the arcade were for.  Malls are private property with common areas.  The old downtown was public property.  We see this problem everywhere.  The public is made private.  The malls killed the downtowns.  In the old days, nobody could fobid you to go to the main drag on a Friday night.  All the town could do was prohibit certain behavior.  If the cops thought a knot of kids is up to no good, they could disperse the kids.  If you were playing a stereo too loud, cop would make you turn it down.  A lot of towns had prohibitions against "cruising" back and forth in cars.  Things like that.  The street kids always hated the cops, but the cops weren't there to be liked.
I remember it was pretty much the same with the malls.  If a kid was involved in fisticuffs, or got caught with drugs or stolen merchandice, he was trespassed.  If he came back to the mall within the next twelve months, he could be arrested.  They didn't just discriminate against an entire age group.  Oh, except for the arcade.  You couldn't be in the arcade during school hours if you were under seventeen.  You could be anywhere else in the mall though.
I have no trouble with the mall beefing up security at peak patronage hours, but I dislike blanket age discrimination.

Our local Mall implemented their policy in Sept. 2003, but it's MB-16. When the local news was covering the story, they talked to some parents who admitted to using the mall as a babysitter for their teens, which was obvious if you ever shopped there. Here's a link to their site with their policy.
I remember when teens used to babysit for children, not get babysat for.  That's part of a larger sociological problem.  Hate to sound like such a fuddy-duddy, but "growing up" seems to just mean having sex and driving cars, not anything to do with mentally maturing these days.  It also comes back to the paucity of places where kids both can hang out, and want to hang out.  I suppose you could go play ping-pong at the K of C hall, but what are you, some kind of a dork?
:P

We have that policy.. on the weekend, no unsupervised chigins after 8. They can be in the movie theater, but they must stay at the theater or the pizza shop right next to it. Sounds fair, and I've never had a problem with it.

I support it, but not as early as the one you mentioned.

In my parents day, the teen hang out was an amusement park (most places in the country, that was the place).  Unfortunately the same thing began happening, too many kids without cash, hanging around and stealing or harrasing families.  The park owners complained about the kids, and they began to crack down heavily on the kids until they stopped coming.  Guess what happened to the amusement parks?  The one I'm thinking about in Worceseter/Shrewsbury became a strip mall.

What they should be doing, is breaking up groups of kids over 6 people.  Perfectly legal, it's a law that's on the books in most states. 

What happens when the places feel more empty?  Well Worcester had a huge downtown Galeria that is now getting bulldozed.  When the places feel empty, people notice and stop coming.  Spend more on security to deal with the troublemakers, or ban everyone based on some age critera and watch the place empty out.