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.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Rafael Mangual is the Nick Ohnell Fellow and head of research for the Policing and Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. He is also the author of Criminal (In)Justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most.
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