Police in suburban Arlington Heights posted a stern message to parents after residents reported damage to their homes from a viral social media trend known as the “door kick challenge.”
In a Monday night Facebook post, the police department said it responded to “several reports” of the TikTok trend over the weekend, where “residents reported damage to their front doors after being kicked in.”
“We encourage everyone, especially parents, to understand the dangers and discuss with their children the various consequences of participating in this trend,” the Facebook post said. “Startling a homeowner in the overnight hours and/or damaging property is not funny. We should all agree everyone’s safety is more important than views/likes.”
NBC Chicago has reached out to Arlington Heights police for more information about the incidents.
The incidents come months after police in other Chicago suburbs also reported the trend had come to their communities, with authorities warning that the challenge could lead to felony charges, or “tragic” consequences.
Cases of the challenge have also been reported across the U.S., with groups of teens or kids running up to front doors of homes, and then kicking them before running off. Some of the events have been caught on doorbell camera.
“It startled me awake. I went outside to see what it was and none of the large trees had fallen on my house so I figured it might have been a large branch,” Sleepy Hollow resident Anne Ybarra told NBC Chicago in August. “There was nothing I could do about it in the middle of the night. I woke up in the morning, instead I saw all the damage to my front door and in the entry way.”
“You could see kids running up to the house, you hear the noise of them trying to break into my front door, you see security lights going on, you hear more kicking, then you hear kids running down the driveway and you can see two of them and two of them and then they’re laughing — ‘We gotta get out of here,'” Ybarra said.
Police Chief Sam Parma told NBC Chicago at the time the scene could be more dangerous than expected.
“They have no idea who’s on the other side of the door,” he said. “They don’t know if it’s an elderly person who, because of this action, is going to cause them to go into a medical emergency. They don’t know if its going to be a veteran who has PTSD that’s going to react in a certain way. They don’t know if it’s going to be an armed homeowner who may react a certain way and if that ends up being tragic outcome where you get a kid getting shot where they’re doing something stupid… there’s absolutely no good outcome that could come from something like this.”
from NBC Chicago https://ift.tt/wWVF4No
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