In a July press conference, New York City mayor Eric Adams painted an upbeat picture of public safety. “When you have six straight months of a decrease in crime,” the progressive former NYPD captain said, “it says that the initiatives that we have put in place, they’re working.” Then–police commissioner Edward Caban echoed this positive message, noting a “2 percent drop in overall major crime.” Neither leader mentioned—or was asked about—the crime numbers for young people. Adams’s only reference was vague: “We’re going to do everything possible to keep our young people in safe places.”
The reality is that teen crime—and victimization—is exploding, but officials, journalists, and even citizens have mostly ignored the problem. Their ignorance is made easier by the increasing difficulty of obtaining accurate data, thanks to the widespread concern among city leaders that collecting and sharing such information could stigmatize young blacks and Hispanics, disproportionately represented in the ranks of the offenders. City agencies, from the juvenile courts to the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), have gone statistically dark in this era of youth crime. At the same time, they have lost, through misguided policy reforms, much of their ability to punish bad behavior. Both problems—the unwillingness to confront the issue publicly and the tangible consequences of bad policy and practice—will need to be addressed if the city is to combat the youth-crime scourge.
The only agency that still believes in compiling and analyzing youth-crime data is the New York City Police Department, and it acts increasingly in a vacuum. For example, when the NYPD arrests a teen under 18 for a minor offense, it generates a “juvenile report.” But the report is not shared with district attorneys, the Department of Probation, or even with the Corporation Counsel, the city agency responsible for prosecuting juvenile delinquency. Only the young person’s guardian receives a paper documenting the incident.
In 2020, then–newly appointed NYPD Assistant Commissioner for Youth Strategies Kevin O’Connor, passionate about harnessing data in order to protect children, instituted weekly YouthStat reports. Resembling the department’s public-facing CompStat reports but in greater depth, the YouthStat reports track youth arrests and youth victimizations. They also tally how many of these incidents are domestic complaints, how many happened in public housing or transit systems, and how many occur by precinct. The reports are comprehensive and can span roughly 250 pages. They remain virtually unknown, even by many within the department, but together, with scraps of information gleaned from other agencies, they reveal an unfolding nightmare.
Last year, 4,843 New Yorkers under 18 were victims of the seven major crimes—a 15 percent increase over 2022, or 631 more incidents, including 254 more qualifying as domestic crimes. Worse, the numbers mark a rise of greater than 60 percent since 2020, or 1,823 more victims. More than 500 youth victimizations last year took place in public housing and 100 in the transit system. And while the number of young victims of murder dipped over 2022 and 2023 and shootings fell in 2023, child killings were heading, by mid-2024, for their highest total in years. Youths are also getting slashed and stabbed at rates 116 percent higher than in 2021. Just last year, these incidents swelled 45 percent; that’s 143 more such attacks. A telling indicator of unsafe lives, instances of children running away or going missing have risen by a third over the past few years—1,522 more disappeared last year than in 2021, and that number has grown again in 2024.
Children aren’t just getting hurt; they’re hurting others. In 2023, 4,798 youths were arrested for infractions encompassing the seven index crimes, a 42 percent jump over 2022. Nearly 100 of these episodes occurred in public housing and 113 in the transit system. Over a quarter more of the crimes took place within domestic settings than in the previous year. Youth arrests for rape were up 84 percent last year over 2020, and they’re up nearly another 10 percent in 2024, year-to-date. Almost 250 more felony assault youth arrests occurred last year than just the year before, a 27 percent escalation. And by July 2024, felony assaults had risen another 15 percent year-to-date—a rate that, if it continues, would mean 1,279 felony assault arrests by Christmas. This would be a 116 percent spike over 2021.
There’s more. Youth arrests for misdemeanor assault (think: sucker-punching) have also surged. Last year, the number reached 1,088 arrests. These kinds of arrests are up another 16 percent in 2024—and are on track to reach 75 percent over 2021. Grand larceny youth arrests (phone and purse snatches, say, or shoplifting) have swelled 113 percent over 2021. This includes an 81 percent increase in 2023, to 736 arrests. And they are up again 40 percent this year, heading toward a 1,030 total. Youth arrests for auto thefts last year were also double the auto thefts in 2021.
Mounting levels of youth disorder, along with increasing reluctance to share data on the problem publicly, owe substantially to the effects of Raise the Age, the 2017 legislation that not only pushed the age of criminal responsibility to 18 but also intentionally created black holes in youth-outcome metrics. Under RTA, essentially all misdemeanor cases for 16- and 17-year-olds now go to family court, as do 83 percent of felonies and even 75 percent of violent felonies. There, judges are now prohibited from knowing or considering an adolescent’s criminal history, even if, say, he had three prior gun arrests that year. Worse, all case outcomes have gone missing from the system. The statewide Office of Court Administration decided to make all RTA cases in family court invisible, including internally for agencies within the criminal-justice system. Even the victims of a violent felony being adjudicated in family court won’t know the result unless they stumble into the right courtroom on the right day. The case’s original criminal court prosecutors can’t see these outcomes; probation officers may or may not relay results when cases are referred to them; and a New York privacy statute bars family court attorneys from the Corporation Counsel from sharing outcomes with the public—including victims.
The majority of 16- and 17-year-old offenders can go right back to terrorizing their communities and classrooms, knowing that they face no consequences for lawbreaking. Commissioner O’Connor, now retired, complained to me that this policy is “creating career criminals by sending the message ‘you can get away with it.’ ” He gave the example of one kid, “Devon,” who had 88 arrests before he turned 18 and is now serving time. “Take Devon and the top ten kids who were together responsible for 450 crimes in their lifetimes,” O’Connor says. “If you stopped them by their fifth arrest, there would have been 400 fewer crime victims and 400 fewer kids traumatized by crime.”
As another former top NYPD official, whom I’ll call Chief Smith, observes, drawing on decades of working in some of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods, “there were always one or two ‘really bad kids’ ” in any few-block radius. After their repeated criminality, police would arrest them and send them to secure detention, run by the Department of Correction. “Take that kid out of the neighborhood,” Smith explained, “and everything diffuses.” Now agents of violence are being reintroduced into communities over and over again.
This is damning for the criminally inclined teens, too, Chief Smith observes. “You have a limited window to help these kids,” he says, which extends to around ages 10, 11, or 12. But now we’re sending even older teens right back into corrosive environments. “It’s all the same problems: broken homes, a lot of poverty, no one else to turn to,” he laments.
Other youths are regularly the victims in this new reality, adds Smith, “getting attacked, beaten up. Getting jumped. At school.” Scrutinizing the limited data suggests that criminal behavior in schools has tripled since RTA took effect. The School Safety Act—intended by the city council to monitor police behavior in the schools, not dangerous students—also inadvertently collects juvenile data by reporting each police intervention in schools. Last quarter, 3,281 such student interventions by police took place; during the same period in 2016, pre-RTA, there were 1,090.
Since RTA removed criminal-justice consequences, many more teens carry weapons, especially guns. Some do it for protection. A former criminal court “youth part” judge observed: “When I started in this business, everyone carrying was going to shoot or rob somebody; now, less than half will.” Gun-toting has increasingly become a “social thing.” As a current NYPD executive noted, the RTA’s impact is “forcing kids to defend themselves.” His hypothesis: “We’re seeing more kids carrying guns because they have to, frankly.” A senior juvenile probation official reflected: “Now, kids are all scared of each other.”
Many still do use the weapons, of course. At a city council hearing in March, the NYPD shared a rare statistical picture of the post-RTA reality of young people and guns. Between 2017 and 2022, the number of juveniles identified as shooters rose 156 percent. While only 75 shooting victims were under 18 in 2017, that number had more than doubled by 2022. In fact, 10 percent of all New York City shooting victims are now under 18. Nobody is talking about it.
What to do with these young offenders? “We’ve abandoned the philosophy of identifying the kids who need the most help and removing them to a place conducive to changing their lives for the better,” Chief Smith laments. The city’s youth-detention centers, now run by the warm-and-fuzzy ACS rather than the hard-nosed Department of Correction (DOC), are supposed to provide youths a safe, productive “time out.” Instead, their policies and operational approaches are contributing to the problem, even as conditions within the facilities increasingly reflect its gravity.
Under RTA, instead of 16- and 17-year-olds going to youth facilities on Rikers Island, they are routed to New York City’s two secure youth-detention centers: Horizon, in the South Bronx; and Crossroads, in Brownsville, Brooklyn. The presence of older teens with serious offenses, combined with the removal of DOC professionals trained for carceral work, seems to be inflaming violence in these settings. An April federal monitor’s report on Horizon—where nearly two-thirds of youths are currently charged with murder or attempted murder—found that the proportion of assaults resulting in injuries surged 30 percent in 2023 over 2022. These figures cover only those arrested at 16 or 17, not the 20 percent who arrive even younger. Weapons use is also rising, with recovery rates per resident in all the city’s detention facilities doubling between 2021 and 2023 and rising another 5 percentage points this year.
It’s clear that the seriousness of the charges against the older teens, along with the overall increase in youth arrests, results in long stays and overcrowding. The average length of stay at Horizon, for instance, is now 133 days; many teens remain for over a year. (In other states, stays last less than a week for about half of residents.) The average daily population in the two secure detention centers has nearly doubled since 2021—up from 101 to 198 last year, and another 36 percent thus far in 2024. In the city’s nonsecure youth-detention facilities, populations nearly doubled between 2021 and 2023 and continue to balloon. So far this year, the average length of stay has also increased 59 percent—an extra 16 days.
Public-facing data leave serious questions unanswered. The Office of Children and Family Services website provides daily snapshots of occupancy that appear for just 24 hours, and then vanish forever. Worryingly, the stated maximum capacities for these facilities keep stretching, suggesting that more teens are getting squeezed into the same-size residences. Further, the facilities are frequently reported to be at capacity. As of mid-August, for instance, Horizon had apparently maxed-out capacity, while Brooklyn’s secure residence, Crossroads, had 120 of its 128 spots filled for male youths and all of its female vacancies filled. What happens, then, if more offenders need secure housing? The workaround is unclear.
The numbers also suggest that, as more violent teens get crowded together, the number of adults supervising them is dwindling. The federal monitor found that, with staff attrition, constant sick leaves, and daily call-outs, Horizon averages less than half the workers and supervisors it needs to be fully staffed. The physical danger and psychological demands of the job contribute to this short-staffing. Workers’ fears for their own safety and recognition of their insufficient training and backup to exert authority have even worse consequences than attrition. For some, the situation encourages tacit agreements with residents to look the other way when they commit criminal acts. A stream of exposés and court cases about New York City’s secure facilities reveal staff purportedly smuggling in weapons, drugs, and whatever else youths—the real bosses—want.
Oversight is so shoddy in the nonsecure facilities that teens regularly sneak out, with absconding rates last year jumping up 33 percentage points. The teens aren’t just out for strolls. Older youths teach the younger ones how, say, to snatch chains and scam adults into sharing Venmo accounts, pretending to raise money for basketball teams. Few face any consequences.
Numerous other misguided, hard-to-track policies are contributing to the deteriorating youth-crime situation. Consider the city’s use of “violence interrupters”—individuals, frequently drawn from the communities they serve, who seek to prevent violence by mediation and talk, particularly among at-risk youth. The Department of Youth and Community Development now contracts with these groups to work in troubled neighborhoods. Though they suck up millions in taxpayer dollars, the violence interrupters aren’t even expected to demonstrate any results; anonymity is part of their schtick. With zero oversight, they spend lavishly on vans with decals and bomber jackets and are plagued themselves by vestigial criminality—an added risk, since ex-cons are often hired for these positions.
How unaccountable are they? At a Community Board 11 youth-crime gathering I attended in East Harlem, a young violence interrupter spoke to the assembly about his work. He recounted a recent incident where he, stationed outside a school, used his neighborhood knowledge and cool-guy buy-in with teens to diffuse altercations. I chatted with him about it afterward. “Yeah,” he told me. “I didn’t say it because there are cops here, but the kids had guns. I didn’t want police to know.”
The system is not holding parents responsible, either, for the neglect and abuse that can inflict massive damage on children. New policies adopted by the city’s ACS allow negligent parents to avoid real investigations that could land them before a judge, and even have their children removed. The celebrated Collaborative Assessment, Response, Engagement & Support (CARES) program is New York City’s “non-investigative child safety assessment response.” The city actually trumpets how CARES does “not involve any determination of possible maltreatment.” So how can it possibly be useful? Alarmingly, the program expanded 46 percent last year, and now covers a fifth of all new child-protection cases.
Instead of investigating abuse allegations, CARES provides parents enrolled in the program with four therapy sessions, administered by ACS workers with no therapy training. The parents are asked to draw “feelings worms”—simple graphics used to identify emotions. They self-report on their own mental health and that of their children. They’re asked whether they provide stable homes. And that’s about it. The parents—who frequently come from disordered homes themselves—receive no serious training in how to parent, or any incentive to try harder. And the hands-off approach leaves their children stuck in potentially dangerous situations.
A veteran ACS investigator named Glenn, reassigned to CARES, explained, “CARES is ‘family-led.’ But some of my families don’t lead well.” In fact, what he sees—women with children from multiple absent fathers, rampant mental illness and dysfunction, homes infested with rats, and babies left sobbing alone in their own urine—is something “most people can’t wrap their heads around.” He agonized: “We used to be warriors for children.”
Why would the city stop investigating child neglect? The answer can be found in Mayor Adams’s annual management report, which describes CARES as a strategy “to address racial disproportionality” along “child welfare and juvenile justice pathways.” Here again, as in all its other uses in public policy, the “equity” lens does nothing for those whom it purports to help—in this case, the growing numbers of children whose abusive parents continue to escape accountability.
Another policy change leading at-risk adolescents toward antisocial lives: the decriminalization of today’s highly potent marijuana, with little regard for measuring the impact. A Manhattan precinct commander described pot’s new ubiquity: “Every kid we arrest has marijuana on them, 100 percent.” The destigmatization of cannabis among the adults in their lives has made pot “like cigarettes now with them. They’ll just do it right in front of you. They don’t expect that anyone would care.”
Glenn, the child-protective specialist, was enraged about the normalization of pot use, even heavy use, among the families he serves. ACS leadership doesn’t care. Worse, pot normalization is leading to a generation of drug-using troubled youths, whose lives are more likely to go off the rails. “I talk to the kids; they can’t do without it now,” Glenn said. “Where is the money coming from to buy it? It’s coming from robbing people.” He’s worked with youths who can’t face a school day without a joint to help them get out the door. “How will they handle life?”
Youth narcotics arrests have nearly doubled since 2021, including a 30 percent jump this year. But an NYPD executive scoffed that these stats don’t begin to capture the extent of youth involvement with drugs. There’s been a “complete retreat” from enforcement, he observed. Even though “narcotics interventions lead to solving other crimes, it doesn’t happen anymore in 2024 NYC.” The logic for a personnel-strapped NYPD is clear, if unstated: drug arrests are a dead end, so they’re not going to get a lot of attention and resources.
The report of a July 2023 monitoring-team visit to New York City’s secure Horizon facility said that four of the ten housing units smelled of marijuana. The previous month, 84 “clips” of marijuana were recovered during a single search. How can this be a stabilizing environment for teens who are already making bad decisions?
Cops are inundated with complaints about marijuana and vaping in schools, too, where, despite Department of Education rules, weed has been effectively legalized. A precinct commander told me about a recent meeting with principals, whose biggest concern was the opening of smoke shops across from school buildings. “Every morning kids are trying to go in there and buy whatever they want to buy, and after school do the same thing.”
School safety officers will sometimes do a pop-up search for weapons and confiscate the drugs they find. But there aren’t enough officers at the NYPD left to watch out for everyone. As Chief Smith told me about proliferating guns, “We can’t watch these kids 24 hours a day.”
One more compounding factor for at-risk youth: the constant presence of social media, which makes it harder for young people to build meaningful lives. Where school drama once ended with the final bell, social media now extends it around the clock, sometimes with profound effects on teens’ safety. “Whether it’s bullying or online beefs, these turn into things that happen in school,” a cop told me.
Teen social-media conflicts sometimes can help alert the NYPD to intervene and prevent violence, but here, again, strong opposition exists to data-collection efforts. City council members, for example, regularly lobby to dismantle the NYPD’s gang database, which stores vital information on gang activity, including social-media posts, and is key to protecting teens. South Bronx councilwoman Althea Stevens, who is pushing to abolish the tool, contends that it stigmatizes “black and brown” youth. “I have seen . . . the . . . stigmas that come with these labels,” she said, overlooking the far greater danger posed by gang violence.
Social media’s grip on the young also erodes their respect for adults, as they follow the suggestions, opinions, and behavior of their peers online. These influencers take no responsibility for the impact they have on others’ lives. They can’t replace the crucial role of a committed adult who shows children how to thrive and holds them accountable for reaching their potential.
Indeed, every adolescent needs grown-ups who protect him from his own underdeveloped judgment, from the influence of peers—most hardwired to encourage taking ill-advised risks—and from truly violent predators. The criminal-justice system and satellite agencies used to back up those adults, helping to compel youths off dangerous paths. But policies now prevent applying any such pressure and bury the results under narratives and rules that hide critical information.
The “data are racist” argument has caused irreparable harm to young New Yorkers—most of them, ironically, black and Hispanic. Without collecting, analyzing, and sharing youth data, we will never know the full effects of policies like Raise the Age—nor, critically, will the public be able to vote its verdict on RTA’s outcomes. Ineffectual contractors such as violence interrupters will keep getting funded. Police will keep brooding over the depressing, lonely knowledge of increasingly horrifying crime stats. Youth-detention centers will remain Dickensian portraits of dog-eat-dog abuse, unsavory power structures, and dissolute schemes.
And more and more New York City youths will struggle through a cannabis-clouded, violent adolescence—insufficiently protected and unprepared to be adults.
Top Photo: In 2023, nearly 4,800 youths were arrested for serious crimes in New York City—a 42 percent increase over the previous year. (Shawn Inglima for NY Daily News/Getty Images)
