Youth arrests in Baltimore have declined in the last five years, according to a new report from The Sentencing Project, which argues that the current narrative around youth crime is inaccurate.
The Sentencing Project is a research and advocacy organization looking to advance “effective and humane responses to crime that minimize imprisonment and criminalization of youth and adults by promoting racial, ethnic, economic, and gender justice.”
“To be clear, any youth crime is a concern. The purpose of this report is to correct the inaccurate assertions from Baltimore’s elected prosecutor and others who would state that youth crime is ‘out of control,’” Joshua Rovner, director of youth justice with the organization, writes in the introduction of the report.
The report is based on data from the Baltimore Police Department’s (BPD) Juvenile Booking Data Analysis Unit.
The numbers presented in the report don’t line up with the perception of there being a rise in youth crime and instead show a decline. There were 458 youth arrests through July 31, 2024, roughly half the number over the same time period in 2019.
For decades, people have said crime was going up. And so looking just at the overall youth arrests, and seeing that those were down pretty significantly from before the pandemic, that was not particularly surprising to me. What was surprising to me was the scope of the drop
Joshua Rovner, director of youth justice with The Sentencing Project
“For decades, people have said crime was going up. And so looking just at the overall youth arrests, and seeing that those were down pretty significantly from before the pandemic, that was not particularly surprising to me. What was surprising to me was the scope of the drop,” Rovner said.
In 2019, 131 young people were arrested in a month on average. In 2024, the monthly average number of youth arrests was 65.
The percentage of youth arrests out of all arrests has also dropped from 10% in 2016 to 5% in 2024.
Rovner said he has been working on the data for years because of the “tension” around youth crime.
In particular, Rovner said that a misconception on youth crime that he sought to correct originated from Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates during a July appearance on the WBAL radio show. In this interview, Bates said that “juvenile crime is out of control.”
“I’m frankly confused at why the State’s Attorney continues to insist that youth crime is out of control. It seems to me that many politicians would, in fact, take credit for the successes that have happened in the city and highlight the fact that youth arrests are way down, and overall violence is down,” said Rovner.
James Bentley II, spokesperson for the State’s Attorney’s Office, dismissed the report’s findings in an email to Baltimore Beat.
James Bentley II, spokesperson for the State’s Attorney’s Office, dismissed the report’s findings in an email to Baltimore Beat.
“The Sentencing Project’s report does not accurately reflect our data nor the experiences of Baltimore City’s residents, and more importantly, completely dismisses the experiences of victims of juvenile carjackings, assaults, armed robberies, and attempted murders,” Bentley said.
Bentley pointed to a recent Baltimore Sun story that reported a decrease in the number of juvenile carjackings as a whole this year but an increase of three juvenile armed carjackings as of September 4, 2024, compared to the total 2023 numbers.
There were 33 total juvenile carjackings reported in Baltimore in 2023, 21 armed and 12 unarmed, and 28 juvenile carjackings in 2024, 24 armed and four unarmed, per The Sun.
These incorrect perceptions can bring an unwarranted, increased scrutiny on teenagers, Rovner said. He added that the report found that about “five percent of arrests so far this year are teenagers while eight percent of the city’s population are teenagers.”
“Whatever image people have of crime in the city, it is not mostly being committed by what is called the juvenile population. It is mostly being committed by adults, who are not being served by the juvenile justice system,” Rovner said.
Heather Warnken, executive director of the University of Baltimore’s Center for Criminal Justice Reform, said she found the document to be very helpful and a “breath of fresh air” as a resource about the reality of youth crime. As one of Warnken’s priority areas, she said she has an understanding of how the numbers don’t align with the narrative on youth crime.
“The perception of youth crime being, ‘out of control,’ and young people driving an outside share of crime and violence just does not align with the data,” Warnken said. “ Not only are young people such a small percentage of those who were arrested and involved in the system overall, but they’re more likely to be victims than they are perpetrators of harm.”
Warnken said a number of these misconceptions arise primarily because of media coverage that vilifies young people.
Another contributing factor Warnken and Rovner both pointed to was the rollback in the 2024 Maryland General Assembly session of bipartisan juvenile justice laws meant to limit the number of children in the legal system.
Nate Balis, director of the Juvenile Justice Strategy Group at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, said the report does a good job of utilizing police data but that it’s important young people who are in trouble are given resources and support to prevent them from being in a position where they would commit a crime again.
“Because our goal is that they never do it again, and our goal is that they instead fill their lives with doing good things like that’s what we want. So what are we doing to increase the odds that kids will thrive, that kids will succeed, that kids will stay away from future offending? Like, that’s the whole point,” Balis said.
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