Number of Young People Accused of Serious Crimes Surges in New York City

NEW YORK — The number of people under 18 accused of major crimes, including murders, robberies and assaults, has increased sharply in New York City in the past seven years, Police Department figures show — a steep trajectory that has alarmed law enforcement officials.

Last year, there were 4,858 major crimes where a minor was accused or arrested, up from 3,543 in 2017 — a 37% increase.

Those accused or arrested in felony assaults, in which a person is seriously injured or a deadly weapon like a gun or knife is used, have jumped by 28% since 2017. Robberies have risen by 52%. Killings in which a young person was accused rose to 36 in 2023 from 10 in 2017.

The number of young victims also rose dramatically, climbing 54% by 2023 compared with 2017.

“Most of what we see is youth-on-youth crime,” said Chief Michael LiPetri, head of crime strategies for the Police Department.

Crime committed by adults also rose in the same period, and the proportion of youth crime in 2023 remained a very small fraction of overall crime, about 3.8%, the same as it was in 2017. Still, police officials say that a rise in serious incidents involving minors can portend more serious future violence.

The seven index crimes are murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny and grand larceny of automobiles. Many of the crimes have continued to increase drastically in 2024, particularly robberies and felony assaults. Through Oct. 1, there were arrests for 969 felony assaults and 2,019 robberies, a 17% increase from the same time last year.

The spikes, which have been particularly pronounced as the city emerges from the disjointed pandemic years and which mirror a national trend, have reanimated a decades-long argument over how to deal with young offenders.

Until recently, the criminal justice system in New York treated many young people accused of serious crimes as adults. But in 2017, when youth crime had fallen to lows not seen for decades, legislators in Albany changed the way the cases of 16- and 17-year-olds were handled, passing a law known as Raise the Age.

Police officials in New York said the law, which diverted most cases of 16- and 17-year-old defendants from adult courts to Family Court or to judges with access to social services and special training, was at the root of the crisis. The law, they said, has made it harder for prosecutors and the police to provide evidence of prior serious offenses that may have gone through the sealed Family Court process, often leading to the release of young people with violent backgrounds. Chief LiPetri called it “a revolving door of justice.”

Some crime analysts and supporters of the law cautioned against reacting to the striking statistics, noting that the increasing number of young people accused of crimes since 2017 mirrors the overall rate of crime in the city, which experienced a surge of violence during and immediately following the pandemic.

They argued that highlighting youth crime can vilify one segment of the population when the problem is society-wide.

“Minors contribute to the overall crime problem, but not in a way that would justify the overwhelming punitive policy response,” said Jeffrey Butts, research professor and director of the Research and Evaluation Center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “Is it misleading to concentrate our attention on one subset of the population?”

Still, high-profile cases propel the debate. Police recently said a group of children, most from Venezuela and some as young as 11, were committing robberies at knifepoint in Central Park and Times Square. On Oct. 4, two boys, 12 and 13, were accused of assaulting David Paterson, a former New York governor, and his stepson as they walked through the Upper East Side.

But most of the time, police said, children are victimizing other children.

“It’s horrible to think that so many kids were victims of crime at such a young age,” said Kevin O’Connor, a retired assistant commissioner who tracks youth crime and has called for the department to let specialized officers work more closely with teenagers.

New York’s rise in youth crime reflects a national problem. While the overall number of shootings and homicides in America fell in 2023, arrests of juveniles for similar offenses increased substantially, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, which collects statistics from around the country.

Public health officials say it is difficult to tie the increase to any single factor.

They cite the proliferation of firearms and the loosening of laws governing carrying them; the failure to fund programs that would help young people; and the influence of social media, where teenagers call one another out on TikTok and YouTube, taunting and making threats in ways that play out violently on the streets.

“A lot of social pressure to be violent has been amplified,” said Daniel Webster, a professor of American health at Johns Hopkins University.

Last week, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville, an area that has long been affected by gang violence, Justice King, a 24-year-old home health aide, stood about 100 yards from a basketball court at Howard Houses, a public housing development. The pavement was cracked, and the backboards were missing hoops.

Teenagers around Brownsville have limited resources and feel that there are few adults around to counsel them or steer them from trouble, said King, who was spending the week helping an anti-violence group do outreach.

Social media, he said, keeps teenagers from developing face-to-face communication skills that would help them settle conflicts peacefully.

“You don’t know how to talk,” King said. “You can’t de-escalate.”

And disregard for the law starts at the top, said Rashad Frazier, 31, an outreach worker, citing federal inquiries into Mayor Eric Adams’ administration, which led to the resignation of several top officials, including Edward Caban, the former police commissioner. He said young people are jaded and less inclined to believe leaders are working for them.

“You got corruption everywhere. It’s like you don’t know who you can trust,” he said. “I can’t trust my mayor. I can’t trust my police commissioner. I can’t trust this. I can’t trust that.”

LiPetri said youth crime has been the most prevalent in southern Queens, the northern parts of Brooklyn and much of the Bronx.

In that borough, 20 people under 18 had been charged with gun crimes this year through mid-October, with four charged in fatal shootings, according to the Bronx district attorney’s office. Thirty-four children had been shot so far this year, according to office numbers, four fatally.

“I have been saying for years that we are losing a generation to death or prison,” said Darcel Clark, the district attorney, whose office has formed an advisory council and held a youth summit to discuss combating the trend.

Clark said she has asked the City Council for money to “correct decades-long neglect of the Bronx that has led to deep-rooted social and economic conditions that cause crime.”

More funding for neglected areas is a better solution than reverting to treating teenagers as adults, said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which lobbied for the Raise the Age law.

“Nothing in the data supports meddling with Raise the Age,” she said.

Before the law, New York was one of the last two states to automatically try 16- and 17-year-olds as adults in Criminal Court, a remnant of policies enacted during decades of high crime.

Juvenile courts were established over a century ago with a mission of rehabilitation, said Marsha Levick, chief legal officer of the Juvenile Law Center, a national legal aid and advocacy organization. But in the decades that followed, policymakers and law enforcement officials instituted more punitive measures, treating juveniles more like adults, she said. The calls grow louder when crimes involving children spike, she said.

Police do not want to return to a policy of locking up juveniles for low-level offenses, LiPetri said.

“We are talking about young kids who hopefully have a long life ahead of them,” he said. “And we’re not looking to disrupt their lives.”

But the law should allow easier detention of repeat violent offenders, he said. He noted that captains and chiefs often hear of teenagers who have committed robberies or been caught with guns only to be released back to the streets.

“There needs to be swift consequences,” LiPetri said.

O’Connor, the retired police official, believes Raise the Age is a major contributor to the increase and said city officials and the mayor must address the issue with more urgency.

“These are the future adults,” he said. “What are these kids going to be like when they’re 20 or 25 years old?”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .