You can tell that we’re moving into election season in Baltimore, Maryland because the biannual tradition of the government trying to convince people that things really aren’t as bad as you think is underway. In response to yet another spate of violent crimes involving minors, the Department of Juvenile Services (DJS) just released a new report that is intended to put all of those bad headlines “into context.” In fact, the title of the report is “Putting Youth Crime in Maryland in Context.” But they’re probably going to need a great deal of context after a mass shooting at a public housing complex in July and another right across from a high school, along with countless individual shootings on various corners around the city. The Secretary of DJS attempted to explain how things are getting better. (Baltimore Sun)

Vincent Schiraldi, the state Department of Juvenile Services secretary, said it’s vital to put those instances in proper context.

On Tuesday, the department released a report breaking down a decade of statewide data on youth crime.

Titled “Putting Youth Crime in Maryland in Context,” the report shows offenses committed by young people make up a small portion of all crimes statewide. It also shows that those crimes committed by young people, which have seen an uptick since the pandemic years, are still down from pre-pandemic levels — part of a roughly decadelong overall decline.

The department is pointing to data related to “total juvenile complaints” per year. Those numbers have risen from 7,100 in 2021 to more than 12,300 this year (which still sounds like a lot to me), but Mr. Schiraldi wants everyone to remember that it’s still fewer complaints than they had in 2020. Since this is Baltimore we’re talking about, I suppose you take your decreases in crime rates where you can find them and try to be thankful.

But we should again point out that these figures cover all juvenile complaints. That could include issues ranging from shoplifting to disturbing the peace. What the department’s top-line figures fail to mention is the one specific area where the crime numbers are out of control. That would be shootings. If you dig down further in the report you’ll find that the number of minors being shot this year in Maryland is four times higher than it was ten years ago, with the majority of the violence taking place in Baltimore.

Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that a lot, though not all of those minors were shot by other minors. And a majority of the victims were “persons of color.” The report tries to take some of the edge off of those statistics by pointing out that the majority of the minors involved are the victims and not the perpetrators. And that may be true, but there are still too many young people with illegal guns shooting other young people out on the streets.

One of the other alarming statistics in the report declared that 10- to 19-year-olds made up 14% to 15% of violent crime offenders in 2021. That might not seem all that disproportional to people who have spent any amount of time covering urban crime. But we’re at the point where they have to include 10-year-olds in the figures. How broken have some elements of our society become when we need to start counting pre-teens in the crime statistics?

I’m old enough to remember a time when such a thing would be pretty much unthinkable. Children got up to “mischief” and were frequently paddled by their parents as a result. Serious, hard crime was the province of adults. But that probably speaks to some of the root problems underlying these trends today. What we’re witnessing in too many places are the results of the breakdown of the nuclear family. That’s not the sort of thing you can cure via legislation, but public awareness and education could at least have the potential to help. But if you evolve a society where lawlessness and chaos are viewed as the norm, these are the results you’re going to see. And it’s a tragedy.