Juvenile Violent Crime: Cooking the Books?
Juvenile Violent Crime: Cooking the Books?
We need to make juvenile justice corrective and redemptive, not procedural and restorative.
The murder of retired Chief Andreas Probst, by teens filming themselves ramming cyclists in a stolen car make a strong case that youth crime is out of control. In other examples, elevated financial limits for felony status on theft and vandalism crime trend together with the proliferation of youth driven organized raids on shops and stores. Today we see organized raids on high end boutique shops and department stores. None of the youth are stealing bread to feed their family.
To say that we are seeing this more, on television and on websites than we did 20 years ago is fair. Twenty years ago, few people had cameras on their cell phones. I didn’t have Twitter before 2010 while today I see live or nearly live action. There have been significant increases in youth crime and violence since 2020, but there is a real problem obtaining authoritative comparative data.
Don’t blame The Facebook or The Tic-Tok
Honestly, has social media ever completely compelled you to do something that you wouldn’t do? I’ve seen a few marriages ruined by Classmates.com or as one victim described it: homewrecker.com. Technology aided infidelity.
Nine years ago, people were doing the ALS ice bucket challenge to support a good cause. Today, people are attributing social media as a cause, or the cause of, violent mob action and acts of disorder. Social apps are today’s medium but acts of youth wilding have taken place notoriously for the last four decades. Seeing elementary school age children about a dozen miles from home in Union Square Manhattan, holding phones while livestreaming acts of violence speaks more to poor parenting than dangerous technology. The attacks on law enforcement, and the willful destruction, the brazen acts of violent criminality, don’t allow reasonable people to blame the phones for this ‘Lord of the Flies’ misconduct.
Public policy lacking its first success is restorative justice; the theory when there is equity and fairness in the procedures, and a magical union is developed resulting in desistance from crime by the offender and a renewed relationship with society.
It is a completely inappropriate approach for a 14-year old’s second carjacking. There are already so many layers of insulation and innovation for first time offenders of minor crimes, including citations and when appropriate, alternative sanctions.
Juvenile Civil Citation
To avoid the stigma of arrest, the humiliation of being deprived of your freedom and shackled in front of your peers, in 2002 and prior there was the existence of an on-site diversion program called the Juvenile Civil Citation. It was rarely used because it was easier to arrest a kid. This would require an admission of guilt, approval of the victim, restitution, and a follow up by the initial responding officer.
Fast forward a dozen years or more and civil citations become state law with local control. Our judicial circuit was singled out, and published inaccurately on a public database, for low compliance on civil citations. Then the League of Women Voters took up the cause. They determined that we were failing, in our two counties, to issue civil citations in domestic violence cases. The League’s case was that these were sibling mutual combatant cases. Boys being boys and being unnecessarily criminalized for it.
The reality was, and is, that these were parents being battered by their children, often much larger violent children. In this dynamic, we were being asked to leave the suspect with the victim. Too often in the sibling cases, the attacker was a teenager, and the victim was a child.
Then we found out how the other circuits were managing their civil citation programs. Long story short, they were physically arresting the youth, they were humiliating the suspects by handcuffing them in front of their peers and transporting them in a secure cage car to an assessment center, basically a juvenile booking office, where they were told that they weren’t under arrest and issued a civil citation. No court case number was generated, therefore no arrest to report and no criminal case to purge.
The League of Women Voters (an agenda group more than concerned female voters) didn’t care whether these youth in 16 or 17 other circuits were functionally being arrested but not counted as arrested. The League didn’t care how many kids got arrested, they just cared that it wasn’t called or counted as an arrest.
Juvenile Detention Criteria: The DRAI
If you go to the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice website, seemingly every aspect of their approach to their mission is a success story. It’s a hard sell, even to the probation officers with tremendous caseload. The Detention Risk Assessment Instrument (DRAI) is the scoring criteria determining whether a youth will be held for a period of up to 21 days. The system is set up where no one is to blame for bad policy. Instead, the DJJ website shares: “The Detention Risk Assessment Instrument (DRAI) was developed by the Department in partnership with representatives appointed by the Conference of Circuit Judges, the Prosecuting Attorneys Association, the Public Defenders Association, the Florida Sheriff’s Association, and the Florida Association of Chiefs of Police.” As soon as there is a high profile crime, this falls apart quickly.
Media outlets provide airtime to chiefs and sheriffs who at press conferences rail against the ‘catch and release’ vulnerabilities of the juvenile justice architecture when a serious crime is committed following a juvenile’s release from custody. Local media report on ‘failures of the justice system’ when a youth who ought to have been in custody instead of committing the new law violation. When there is a critical incident, have you ever heard from the collaborators who supposedly developed the risk assessment tool? All you see is passing of the buck.
Cooking the books?
If you review an August 2022 U.S. Department of Justice document about 2020, there is nothing but good news.
“By 2020, the number of violent crime arrests involving youth reached a new low, 78% below the 1994 peak, and half the number 10 years earlier. Males accounted for 80% of all youth arrests for violent crimes in 2020, but their share of murder (92%) and robbery (88%) arrests was much greater. Youth ages 16–17 accounted for more than half (55%) of all youth arrests for violent crime, but accounted for 76% of all youth arrests for murder. White youth accounted for nearly half (49%) of all youth arrests for violent crime and 57% of youth arrests for aggravated assault.”
“The Sentencing Project’s review of the available data about youth violence during the pandemic finds scarce evidence of a youth-led crime wave. Rather, most of the data suggest that youth violence has been flat or declining.”
However, the Wall Street Journal makes some claims that align with the reality we see.
“In the U.S., homicides committed by juveniles acting alone rose 30% in 2020 from a year earlier, while those committed by multiple juveniles increased 66%. The number of killings committed by children under 14 was the highest in two decades, according to the most recent federal data.”
We are also seeing more youth die while trying to commit crimes. D.C. police said a driver shot and killed a 13-year-old carjacker Saturday near Judiciary Square. Metropolitan Police said the victim was sitting in his car on the 600 block of D Street Northwest when he was approached by two juveniles around 10 p.m.
In Maryland, CBS News reports: “The number of young people shot has risen dramatically, four times what it was a decade ago, the data shows.”
"Murder and attempted murder arrests for juveniles in Baltimore City have consistently increased over the past five years, while juvenile arrests for murder across the state fluctuated somewhat through 2021," the department said. "The number of youth who are victims of violent crimes has increased significantly, with non-fatal shooting of young people quadrupling statewide over the past decade. "
Remain mission focused
There are limits to what the police can do within their mission to mitigate youth violence. It is not the mission of the police to be mentor, surrogate father, be a reading coach and sports coach to every child not living a perfect life. When you try to fill too many roles, you wind up looking like Lucy and Ethel working at the candy factory.
Our culture feeds on ego boosting compliments, and eventually we are not saying no to anyone anymore. If someone tells officers they believe the police can fix anything, it’s not long until they are on a ladder with a drill.
Our core duties demand there be some occasional diversions from traditional police work to gauge performance out of setting and sometimes out of uniform. Every officer deserves an opportunity to display leadership and their best connection with the community. Too many officers have adopted their long-term roles within community involvement units and school posts. Many have a skill set but we’ve all met the cops who think they can fake sincerity.
Instead of trying to save youth one by one, law enforcement should be dismantling the institutions that aim to corrupt kids. Instead of trying to unscramble a decade of bad parenting, let’s crush those who aim to exploit youth through force, fraud, and coercion. This requires bold enforcement of the so-called victimless crimes.
Let’s get some lawmakers in the passenger seat of marked units, wearing ballistic vests, on busy nights to see youth running wild at the witching hour. Across this country, we need some champions to make juvenile justice corrective and redemptive, not procedural and restorative.
Please keep all of our officers and deputies in your prayers.
References:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/violent-crime-rate-juvenile-11674485556#
https://ojjdp.ojp.gov/publications/trends-in-youth-arrests.pdf