The scene unfolding outside his patrol car at 1:30 a.m. on Sunday startled even the veteran police chief.

“It was chaotic,” Chief Rico Boyce recounted to city leaders at a public meeting days later. “Something I had never seen in my 26 years here at the Raleigh Police Department.”

Authorities had planned for large crowds in North Carolina’s capital over the holiday weekend, Boyce said, but this went beyond that. He described hordes of rowdy young people — police estimated as many as 8,000, many juveniles, many from outside the city — that gathered first in one commercial area, then converged later on another known as Glenwood South.

What followed was a night marred by disorder and violence, one that police say left nine people injured by gunfire, led to the seizure of nearly a dozen guns, resulted in 29 arrests of young adults and delinquency cases against multiple minors. The scenes soon spread across social media and news coverage of overflowing sidewalks and streets, of shouting and cursing, of blaring sirens mixing with blaring music, of crime scene tape and people face down being handcuffed.

Boyce, who described the episode as “heartbreaking and unacceptable,” said he leaped to break up a fight at one point, only to discover one of the youths involved had a gun.

“We were prepared for the crowd size,” Boyce said this week, as he and other city officials grappled with how to head off a repeat of the mayhem. “What we were not prepared for was the amount of firearms we were recovering off individuals.”

Raleigh is among the latest places to wrestle with so-called “teen takeovers,” events largely coordinated over social media that result in swarms of young people flocking en masse to public places such as a downtown area, mall or park.

The gatherings — and the turmoil that sometimes accompanies them — have caused alarm, bewilderment and an array of responses in cities around the country.

Among commentators on the right, they have become a symbol of the breakdown of law and order in cities, a failure of teen parenting and the corrosive power of social media.

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