Officials had eye on Gallery before latest rampage

Days before a large group of teens conducted their after-school rampage through Macy's yesterday, city, school district and merchant association officials met to discuss how to deal with large mobs of students converging on the Gallery.

"We met . . . last week to discuss a pattern of behavior similar to what we had yesterday, although not as egregious," said James Golden, chief safety executive for the Philadelphia School District.

Fifteen students, ages 14 to 17, were arrested in yesterday's incident. They were from eight high schools: Simon Gratz, George Washington, Bartram, Olney High West, Lincoln, Mastbaum, Ben Franklin and Ombudsman Hunting Park, a disciplinary school, Golden said in a phone interview this afternoon.

District officials are weighing whether to take administrative action against the students, such as suspension or expulsion, Golden said.

The various agencies, which met on Friday, are looking at ways to diffuse "rude and disorderly behaviors" of students that have been gathering at the Gallery, specifically the Food Court, he said.

Representatives of the school district, the Center City District and Gallery security and management officials attended the meeting, he said.

Yesterday's gathering resulted in confrontations with pedestrians, $700 worth of damage at Macy's and fights in the street, turning a usually peaceful Center City shopping district upside down for the second time in two months.

The school district, for example, is calling other large districts around the country to see how they have handled such problems. The youths apparently organized the meeting through Internet social networks and when large crowds were thrown out of the Gallery, they began throwing snowballs and causing havoc, officials said.

"We are part of a public education network that we can tap into to learn more about how to handle this," he said. "Clearly the pattern that was described poses a challenge for the city and for the Center City District specifically."

Golden said school safety officials had not heard about the planned gathering at the Gallery through the schools yesterday.

But district officials are looking for ways to tap in so that they might become aware the next time something is planned. Monitoring social networking sites is one possibility being looked at, he said.

"That would be among a range of strategies we'll be contemplating to determine how these things are being planned, by whom and so forth," Golden said.