A veteran South Side Chicago pastor and anti-violence activist is warning that the smartphone has become a threat to young people as dangerous as the gangs he has confronted for decades, saying the device is eroding parental authority and turning street conflicts into livestreamed spectacles that end in funerals.
Pastor Corey Brooks, who has spent years mediating gang truces, running after-school programs and helping former gang members enter mainstream society, writes that the phone does not look like a threat at first glance. For many young people in his neighborhood, it has been a genuine tool for opportunity — a way to make music, build an online following and learn about the world beyond their block. Some have built real careers with nothing but a phone, a path out of poverty he says he has no desire to shut down.
But Brooks points to drill rap, which he translates as «kill rap,» as the clearest example of the phone's destructive power. The genre began on O-Block, where his church and community center sit. While some of it is honest storytelling about a life most of the country has never seen, some of it has become a weapon. Fights that once happened on street corners now play out on livestreams, followed by location tags that function as challenges — «come and get us.»
Young viewers, some as young as 10, watch these streams half-listening to the music and half-waiting for gunfire. When shots ring out, Brooks or a nearby pastor often has to host the funeral. Violence impact teams are then dispatched to hospitals and family homes to prevent retaliatory shootings. Police and prosecutors comb through the livestreams afterward, and comments left on them may be treated as confessions, leading to some young people being locked up.
The problem is not confined to the streets. Brooks says parents in stable families far removed from gangs and drill rap struggle with the same device. Children cannot put the phone down, and easy access to pornography arrives before they have a chance to form healthy relationships. In a culture that no longer teaches courtship, he asks what a child wired by pornography thinks when encountering the other sex.
Parents describe the same dilemma in strikingly similar words: they do not know how to take the phone away without ending their child's world, and they doubt whether they even have the authority to try. When they do, children accuse them of cutting them off. The phone, Brooks writes, becomes a weapon the child uses against the parent's authority. Kids tell their parents they are smarter, an illusion he attributes to Googling or using AI during arguments — using a machine to speak for oneself rather than learning or processing the actual disagreement.
That dynamic, he argues, deprives both child and parent of the process of working through misunderstandings, weakening the fabric of their relationship. The real crisis is not the technology itself but the erosion of an adult's ability to set a limit on it.
Brooks does not call for a ban. Instead, he urges a cultural shift that restores the basic parental authority previous generations took for granted. His recommendations are concrete: take the phone away at night, put limits on its use, tell children to sit at the table and do homework, go to church, look people in the eye when talking, and make them face reality instead of a screen.
He also stresses that parents cannot do this alone. The wider community of adults must echo the pushback so children understand that not just their parents but the entire community is setting the boundary. Having fought drugs and gangs, Brooks says the phone may be even harder to confront. His closing thought is blunt: a phone cannot love a child. It can only hold their eyes through the trickery of the algorithm. Somebody has to be there to hold that child and love that child, and that, he says, must be us.