Teenagers have terrorized the Target store at the intersection of U.S. 218 and TPC Parkway for months, shoppers and a councilwoman’s office said. Credit: Google Maps / Street View

San Antonio Reddit users are complaining about groups of wild teenagers wreaking havoc at the Target store near U.S. Highway 281 and TPC Parkway in the affluent Stone Oak suburb.

Those concerns surface as the councilwoman representing the district where the retailer is located pushes for City Hall to hire more police officers amid a budget crunch.

In a recent post, Reddit user @throwitawaybruh2 said they saw youths 13 to 17 years old running through the Target store’s aisles last weekend and harassing employees. The person blamed the chaos on “spoiled” offspring of affluent Northsiders.

“A good number of those kids were wearing shirts with religious themes,” the user wrote in their post, which has garnered more than 400 upvotes and 163 comments as of press time.

Concern over teens’ unruly behavior at the Stone Oak Target have been building since February, according to posts in the Mothers Around Stone Oak (MASO) private Facebook group obtained by the Current.

In one of those posts, a Stone Oak mom said she heard a teen yelling profanities inside the store. Another accused youths of throwing balls and chip bags at each other and of eating food they hadn’t purchased.

“I literally witnessed a kid in the pillow bin, just walking through the aisles, knocking stuff over on purpose,” one MASO member recently wrote. “When another patron commented that they needed to stop it, he just started running with a group of girls giggling. No wonder SAPD is always outside.”

SAPD hiring debate

Megan Coleman, spokeswoman for District 9 Councilwoman Misty Spears’ office, said problems at the Target location have persisted since at least summer of last year.

After the store’s manager registered a complaint about the teens with Spears in December, the office helped coordinate a meeting between the manager, the San Antonio Police Department and the local SAFFE officer, according to Coleman.

Although the meeting yielded an agreement to add a larger police presence at the Target store, members of the MASO Facebook Group said they’re still seeing criminal activity at there.

Coleman said the issues at Target are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to petty crime and theft in District 9, which has experienced an uptick in property crime over recent months. However, she was able to quantify exactly how much those crimes have increased.

Crime citywide declined by 13% last year, according to San Antonio Police Department figures.

Spears is one of three council members — the others being District 10 Councilman Marc Whyte and District 7 Councilwoman Marina Alderete Gavito — calling for the city to free up funding to hire 65 SAPD officers instead of the 40 now planned. As evidence of the need, the three cite a report from a city-hired consulting firm that recommended hiring 360 additional employees over the next five years.

“Let’s not make this be political,” Whyte said during a council meeting on the issue earlier this month. “This is not about winners and losers. This is about making our community safer, and we will prevent crimes against our citizens, we will prevent more of those crimes in the years if we have more officers on the street.”

Even so, other members, including District 2 Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez and District 5 Councilwoman Teri Castillo, said council should focus on addressing the root causes of crime rather than hiring more police, who respond to crimes already in progress.

Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones has also bristled at stepping up police hires since the city is grappling with a $174 million budget deficit over the next two years.

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Michael Karlis is a multimedia journalist at the San Antonio Current, whose coverage in print and on social media focuses on local and state politics. He is a graduate of American University in Washington,...