Juvenile crime in Baltimore lower than pre-pandemic levels: Study

Juvenile crime in Baltimore is well below where it was almost a decade ago, according to a report released this week, cutting against city leaders who say criminal youths are an urgent threat to public safety.

Average monthly juvenile arrests in Baltimore last year were almost a third of the 2016 number, the Abell Foundation said in its probe of recent trends in underage offending, although city leaders said the study was based on incomplete data.

Additionally, the report said fiscal 2025 complaints against youngsters — which qualify as any contact with police, not only arrests — are on par with where Baltimore was in fiscal 2018 and well below where it was in fiscal 2017.

“Offending by young people generally has been decreasing in the Baltimore area for years,” said report author Robin Campbell, who runs the communications firm Catalyze LLC and works with anti-imprisonment efforts. “It plummeted during COVID and has returned to near below pre-pandemic levels now.”

Mr. Campbell said the report, which collected data from the Department of Juvenile Services (DJS), the Governor’s Office of Crime Control & Prevention and the nonprofit Sentencing Project, are at odds with media coverage about juvenile crimes.

Some headlines from this month include a 16-year-old boy charged with attempted murder in connection to an October shooting and a 17-year-old girl who was linked to a carjacking in which she and an accomplice targeted a father as he loaded his baby into the vehicle.

Juvenile crime became such a hot-button issue in the state that Gov. Wes Moore asked former DJS Secretary Vincent Schiraldi to resign this summer — a move that was celebrated by Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott.

In a fall survey of city leaders across the country, Baltimore officials cited juvenile crime as a major problem, particularly the “seriousness of offenses committed by young people.”

Mr. Campbell’s report did not address whether juveniles had been accused of more dangerous crimes after the pandemic.

But it did say that the rate at which prosecutors successfully had youths ordered behind bars or placed on probation was roughly the same in fiscal 2019 (39%) as it was in fiscal 2024 (42%).

The report further said that the most common felony charge against youths in adult court was felony gun possession. It is also the case that is most frequently transferred to juvenile court, the report said.

The Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office disputed the findings of the report, saying it provided the DJS with its prosecution data to include in the exposition, but the agency refused.

“While the report suggests that youthful offending remains at or near historically low levels, that conclusion rests on data that is inaccurate, fragmented, inconsistently collected, and largely inaccessible to the public and to victims,” top prosecutor Ivan Bates said in a statement.

He also said that arrest and jail numbers are poor measures of crimes committed, given how the justice system works.

“Arrest figures and incarceration numbers alone do not capture the full scope or impact of juvenile crime — particularly in a system where cases are routinely diverted, informally resolved, or sealed from view. When outcomes, repeat offending, and case dispositions are obscured, the resulting data paints an artificially narrow picture of public safety,” Mr. Bates said.

The Washington Times contacted Baltimore Police for comment on the report but did not get an immediate response.

The city’s top prosecutor did agree with one central finding of Mr. Campbell’s report — data about juvenile crime needs to be readily accessible.

Mr. Campbell said more eyes on data is a good thing and can help achieve an accurate consensus on crime trends in Baltimore.

“It would be great if these agencies could cooperate together and find and present data that the public could understand,” he said. “If we did that, we could have better policies that keep people safer and better for kids and waste less money.”