Teenage victims and criminals have increased since ‘raise the age’ law passed

This year, New York City residents have been benefiting from historic declines in shootings and homicides, and from less-sharp, but still meaningful, decreases in other crime categories.

However, Gotham’s youth crime problem has stubbornly resisted the trend.

Earlier this year, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch told reporters that between 2018 and 2024, the number of juvenile shooters spiked by nearly 200% while the number of juvenile shooting victims jumped by more than 80%.

This week’s fatal stabbing of 14-year-old Angel Mendoza provided yet another gruesome reminder of this difficult challenge.

The ninth grader was brutally assaulted in a Bronx park by at least four teenage thugs, two of them minors, who allegedly pistol-whipped, beat, and then stabbed Mendoza to death — all of it recorded on video.

The fatal stabbing, as with other recent incidents of fatal teen-on-teen violence leaves us asking why youth violence is on the rise during a citywide crime decline.

One possible answer lies in New York’s 2017 “Raise The Age” law — signed by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who also closed multiple juvenile detention facilities during his tenure.

The law drastically reduced the likelihood that 16- and 17-year-old offenders would face meaningful terms of incarceration for even serious crimes by sharply increasing the rate at which their cases are diverted to Family Court.

A 2023 Manhattan Institute study found that as of September of 2022, 83% of felonies involving 16- and 17-year-old offenders ended up in family court, including 75% of non-drug-related Class A felonies — the most serious crime category.

In 2021, the New York City Criminal Justice Agency found that in the first year after the law took effect, the Big Apple saw a significant spike in rearrests among juvenile beneficiaries.

Yet state lawmakers have refused to reexamine the law.

One of the decarcerationists’ favorite points to make in the law’s defense is that youthfulness should always be viewed as a mitigating factor.

Our brains are not fully developed until well after we reach the age of maturity, the argument goes, therefore it is unjust to hold teenagers fully responsible for their crimes.

But the vast majority of America’s teens aren’t knifing one another to death in parks, carjacking soccer moms or popping handguns off in the streets — making that argument much less persuasive.

It’s a statistical reality as well that younger offenders reoffend at higher rates than older ones do.

And what about the incentive for gangs to recruit younger and younger kids into their ranks — kids they can convince to do their dirty work in part because they won’t face the same consequences they would have less than 10 years ago?

As has been the case with so many criminal justice reform initiatives, the available data indicate that the population Raise the Age meant to benefit — teenagers — are worse off in the law’s wake.

The Manhattan Institute’s 2023 report found that juveniles were “the victims of gun crime about three times as often as they were five years [prior].”

One wonders whether those who defend these policies would tolerate teens who supposedly lack the mental capacity to resist brutally violent impulses walking the streets of their own neighborhoods.

If not, then why are they willing to allow it in the Bronx?

Rafael A. Mangual is the Nick Ohnell fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a contributing editor of City Journal, and author of the 2022 book “Criminal (In)Justice.”