An 11-year-old boy is behind bars after a nearly week-long crime spree that included armed assault and robbery, Breitbart reported. The child's arrest was announced Monday by the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police.
The child's first alleged crime was committed on the afternoon of May 21, USA Today reported. Police responding to the scene were told that the young suspect approached the victim and demanded the person's belongings.
When the victim refused, the boy pulled a gun which prompted the victim to comply with the directive. The suspect then took off running with the victim's things.
The next report about the boy came three days later when police were called about an assault on the afternoon of May 24. Witnesses to the crime reported that two bicycle-riding suspects approached the victim, who pushed one of them and ran away.
When the suspect caught sight of the witnesses, he allegedly pointed a gun in their general direction. Nobody was hurt, but it wouldn't be the end of the 11-year-old's crimes.
On the evening of May 26, the suspect was riding a bicycle and once again allegedly approached a victim and demanded the person's possessions. After witnessing the suspect reach into a fanny pack "as if they were armed," the victim complied.
The suspect then took off on his bike as the victim ran away. The boy was finally arrested on May 27 and was charged accordingly for each of the incidents.
Although the investigation is still ongoing, the 11-year-old's crime spree represents a growing trend. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, the rate of juvenile crime is soaring.
In a reversal of a decade-long downward trend, violence perpetrated by children has been on the rise since 2020. Children acting alone committed 30% more murders in 2021, and multiple juveniles acting together committed 66% more that same year.
In fact, the number of homicides committed by juveniles below the age of 14 hit its highest rate in two decades since then. Unfortunately, the rise in juvenile criminals also translates to a rise in child victims as juvenile-on-juvenile shootings have risen.
Police in New York City reported that the number of children committing shootings doubled between 2020 and 2022. In 2020, 62 children were involved in gun crimes, but that number jumped to a whopping 124 shootings in the city in 2022.
"The tragedy here is that we’re talking about a gunman who is too young to be called a gunman because he’s 15 years old," Darcel D. Clark, Bronx District Attorney, said of one such case involving a teenager. "These ages make you weep."
Some are blaming the 2020 coronavirus pandemic and the lockdowns for the uptick in juveniles. It's true that children were isolated from one another, pulled from schools, and thrown into home situations that were not ideal in the name of public health.
However, the disrespect for law enforcement that radical leftists pushed through riots and the Black Lives Matter movement during that time are more compelling factors. Besides the senseless loss of life, the greatest tragedy in this trend is that these child criminals have little hope for a productive future.
