By Mike Males, Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, October 14, 2019
Leaders across the United States agonize over recent mass shootings as Americans fear more to come. Perhaps we can learn from youth in two mega-cities where gun violence has fallen dramatically even as politicians fail to act.
Teenagers in the nation’s two largest metropolises, New York City and Los Angeles, once suffered gun killing rates triple the national average. Over the last 25 to 30 years, however, teens’ gun death rates in these two cities have fallen by an astonishing 88%, including drops of 88% in gun homicides and 81% in gun suicides.
In the LA-Compton-Long Beach areas, homicide arrests of youths fell from 289 in 1990 to 15 in 2018, mirroring a trend in youth crime declines across urban California. Comparing 2018 to their respective peak arrest years of the early 1990s, youths’ homicide arrests fell from 34 to one in San Francisco, 25 to one in Oakland, 24 to two in Sacramento, and 16 to one in Fresno. As the teenaged youth population in the state’s 15 largest cities rose by 200,000 to over 1.1 million, murder arrests of youths fell from 373 in 1990 to 36 in 2018.
Comments (0)