Maybe GOAC and the Department of Education need to spend less time fretting about the standardized tests that kids (and reasonable parents and teachers) ignore and dedicate the 2020 Session to dealing with an alleged increase in kids’ ignoring the law. The South Dakota Fraternal Order of Police says more kids are committing violent crimes:
Some as young as 12, says FOP Vice President Tim Doyle, some in trouble time and again.
“We’re dealing with the same kids over and over. They’re stealing a car and then a couple of days later they’re back out stealing another car.”
Doyle says there has to be early intervention to keep kids from going bad, while at the same time getting tougher on repeat juvenile offenders.
The FOP is calling for state lawmakers, school officials and other stakeholders to meet with local law enforcement to come up with solutions [Mark Russo, “A Rising Problem in South Dakota of Kids Being Criminals,” KELO Radio, 2019.12.05].
Rapid City cops agree that the state needs to take action:
The Rapid City chapter of a statewide organization representing police officers, says crimes committed by juveniles continue to rise in number.
…[T]he Fraternal Order of Police… is asking that state officials meet with local law agencies to look at the effectiveness of the reforms, and determine if more steps need to be taken to stem the rate of juvenile crime.
The Rapid City Area Schools and Rapid City Police Chief Karl Jegeris joined in the Fraternal Order of Police’s call for an evaluation to begin, in a letter issued this week [“Rapid City Police Union Says Juvenile Crime Is on the Rise,” KELO Radio, 2019.12.05].
Yet the Attorney General’s most recent annual report on crime in South Dakota said that juvenile arrests decreased 4.6% in 2018, from 5,270 in 2017 to 5,026 last year. U.S Department of Justice statistics show that national juvenile arrest rates for violent crimes have dropped from a peak of 478 per 100,000 population in 1994 to 138/100K-pop in 2018.
Far be it from me to argue with the officers in the field chasing down bad guys. If they find they are running into more young repeat violent offenders, then yes, we should talk about how to keep everyone safe from those young punks and what public policies we can enact to defuse punkification in the first place.
But any conversation on this matter should include figuring out whether violent juvenile crime really is increasing, and if ti is, what factors in South Dakota are causing an increase while the rest of the country is seeing a decrease.
Police, soldiers, airmen, sailors, fire wo/men — always WANT more. When in fact we need less of them. The data do not lie.
I think folks are looking at different data. Violent crime is not the same as stealing cars. Neither is wholesome, I admit.
For some reason young teens in Madison, WI, and Rapid City, SD, and probably places in between are fadding out on cruising in cars that aren’t theirs. They’ll boost cars with keys left in them and go for a drive, which turns inevitably into reckless driving. The purpose seems to be to crash the car sometime in during the joy ride, and then run like hell to escape capture. This seems to be a equal opportunity fad, because it’s happening with all races and sexes here in Madison, WI.
I’m not going to say all these 12-16 year olds are going to be life-long criminals. When I was a young teen we would boost our parents’ cars when they were asleep. We didn’t drive recklessly, because we wanted the car parked safely in the driveway by morning so we didn’t face parental consequences. I do say these kids are a bit more brazen than we were, though. They take strangers’ cars, something we would never have done, though we would siphon gas from anyone’s tank.
My brother got caught one night on his way to some dance in Madison, SD. I remember the phone call from the Madison, SD, police, and going up there to collect him from the pokey.
Once again South Dakota appears to be poised to return to tired, ineffective responses to (alleged) crime. If juveniles really are engaging in more bad behavior (and I should note I’m very skeptical that this is anything other than anecdotal “evidence”) the way to stem it is not police intervention or arrest and incarceration. Instead, it’s creating community support systems and implementing policies and funding so that kids are supported in their families, schools, and communities. The reality is that South Dakota is unwilling to do the hard work of untangling these problems and finding the cash to put in place solutions. We consistently look for the cheap fix of punishment that doesn’t serve individual children or public safety in any meaningful way. I don’t trust the FOP to present a good plan for a variety of reasons, but I think the old adage is more succinct than I can be: when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail.
Mr. Pay is probably correct on this one.
Arrest rates for violent juvenile crime may be down, but that could be a result of fewer violent crimes committed by juveniles, or reflect it being tougher to find and arrest the perpetrators.
As Mr. Pay notes, it’s probably more likely that non-violent crime is much more prevalent (and may even be rising), which wouldn’t be reflected by the single statistic Cory found.
You can “prove” anything with statistics. One in every 3 children born today is Chinese, so statistically, if you have more than a couple of kids, chances are one of them will be Chinese. As Mulder used to say, “The truth is out there.” ;-)
There are a variety of ways to look at crime. One is punishment after it happens, as the FOP is. Another is prevention. Teach the doofi to take the keys out of the car — so simple! A third is trying to get at why thieves would think it’s acceptable to steal a car simply because the keys are in it. That would be the root of the problem and quite likely address several more crimes at the same time.
Personally, I think a mix of all three, with heavy emphasis on #3, would be most effective. The sad part is, #3 is usually the one to get funded least and/or more intermittently.
I agree with LS1. And I wonder if arrest rates are down because juvenile crime is being handled differently…..meaning rather than arresting teens for ‘minor’ crimes, kids parents are being called to come get them, like in the old days.