As a tween remains in critical condition after Minneapolis shooting, questions renew on youth felonies

CATHY WURZER: There's a young girl from Minneapolis who remains in critical condition today after being shot over the weekend, along with three other children. The kids in question are between the ages of 11 and 13 and were shot while joy riding in a stolen car.

The case renews the question about what to do when kids that young are committing serious crimes. The Hennepin County Attorney's Office wants police to refer cases to their office and says that when there's not enough evidence to charge, the child could instead be referred to their youth auto theft early intervention initiative. But Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara says he wants to see those kids arrested and charged.

BRIAN O'HARA: The idea of catch and release with violent juveniles is not working. It's not fair to the kids involved or to the victims of serious crime. The time they spent detained would enable the system to identify resources to provide them to these kids instead of immediately releasing them right after they're arrested to go back into the same environment that produced this same result.

CATHY WURZER: Now, the specifics of this case are not clear because of privacy laws for children in the juvenile system. But it has renewed an argument between agencies about the best approach to stopping kids from committing serious crimes. We wanted to learn more about what's happening on the ground.

So joining us right now are two people from the organization Restorative Justice Community Action, which provides services to youth who have committed crimes in Hennepin and Ramsey Counties. Cynthia Prosek is their executive director and Kara Beckman is a University of Minnesota researcher who works with the organization. Kara and Cynthia, thank you for taking the time.

CYNTHIA PROSEK: Thank you for the invitation.

CATHY WURZER: Can you help us out here? I was going through state law 2017. Kara, excuse me, Kara. I was going through state law in 2017 that said that kids under the age of 14 who commit serious crimes can't be charged. Is that right?

KARA BECKMAN: That's not correct. It actually is that they can't be charged as an adult. They can be charged. They cannot be charged as an adult. So they cannot be sent into the adult system for processing.

CATHY WURZER: OK. Would you like to make a comment about that, Cynthia?

CYNTHIA PROSEK: Yeah, I was just letting Kara answer that. Yeah, it's a very complicated system. There's also a movement where there's a new law coming into place where youth under 14 will not be charged. But that's not in effect now and hasn't been in effect. So youth have been able to be charged for a long time. From the age of 10 up.

CATHY WURZER: OK. Is your organization seeing younger and younger kids committing more violent crimes? What's the ground level situation out there?

CYNTHIA PROSEK: The average age really revolves around that middle school age between 14 and 16. There have been some more, but this is a complicated time. These kinds of cases are tragic and there aren't any easy answers. I think what the public needs to understand is that we have a system that is woefully ineffective, that has woeful ineffective responses for children this age. Our children and communities deserve leaders who are dedicated to finding meaningful and effective responses. And that includes a shift from the conversation that the only form of accountability is punishment or detention.

CATHY WURZER: Well, Kara, why do you think we're seeing kids getting involved with more violent crimes at such a young age? What's the reason behind some of this?

KARA BECKMAN: Well, I mean, I think that's a question that is probably broader than a brief conversation. But I do think we all know that coming out of COVID-19 pandemic, there was a real loss in public investment in children. And there was a real-- they're watching the adults in their lives have not very productive conversations. And many children are reeling within that context.

And they're not being surrounded by love and support and opportunities to go through typical developmental tasks of adolescence, which includes risk taking and thrill seeking in safer ways. And so a real lack of investment in community is what leads to these kinds of things.

And absolutely, there's been an increase in that since the pandemic. And I think those things could probably be directly linked. And there hasn't been any kind of sufficient investment to really head that off at a prevention stage and rely on something more than detention and punishment as a response.

CATHY WURZER: So these kids are kind of unmoored, in a way, and have been unmoored, if I'm hearing you correctly, since about the pandemic. So they don't have these strong support systems. And so Cynthia, and you can certainly chime in here, too, Kara, that investments that you've been talking about, what does that look like, Cynthia? When you talk about investments to try to help these kids, what are meaningful investments?

CYNTHIA PROSEK: Well, so that really means that there have been quite a few opportunities to intervene and do something, but it's been on a very small scale. So there isn't a lot of investment in funding for community centered work where we can help support youth with better decision making, supporting the family, and how they work through what's the barriers that are occurring in their lives, along with supporting them in new ways of working through conflict, getting all the basic needs met.

That is really what we need to do is we need to focus on community interventions. And the funding really is on a higher level or rather than going straight into community, it's kind of stuck in that middle area either with the criminal legal system or larger nonprofit organizations that have a lot of infrastructure but aren't necessarily connected to a lot of the community that are needing the funds to help do that work.

CATHY WURZER: So I'm wondering, Kara, when you hear Chief O'Hara saying that he's sending cases for kids to be charged and in that time wants the services to be provided, is that an approach that could work or is working? I don't know what you think of that. What does research show?

KARA BECKMAN: The research shows that we have woefully ineffective responses for children of this age. We have a juvenile legal system that is in reality only slightly adapted from an adult system designed to determine guilt and impose punishments. And really importantly, it's infused with the principle that people are innocent until proven guilty, and that meaningfully slows down the process. And a child develops quickly, right. A one year long process to determine their guilt and then impose a punishment is not at all developmentally appropriate.

And imposing consequences also kind of misunderstands where youth brain development is at. We are not going to be able to come up with some magical consequence that will override the developmental stage of an 11-year-old, which tends towards impulsiveness and a tendency towards high risk behavior. What we can do is create more opportunities for those behaviors to happen in safer settings like on a basketball court and then also create accountability practices that aren't reliant on causing harm first.

We have to have responses that can happen in community that are appropriate and meaningful and effective. And it's going to take leaders working together to design. That new law that does not go into effect until 2026 is exactly designed to spur those kinds of conversations to say this system has not worked for the youngest children and we need to come up with something different. And we need leaders who are willing to come to the table and be honest about that and not demonize children who are acting in ways that are predictable given what society has set up.

CATHY WURZER: This is absolutely you're right about this, Kara, that we need more time with this for sure. Maybe this is a different show for a different time. But I appreciate your time right now and kind of setting the stage for us. Thank you so much for your work.

KARA BECKMAN: Thank you for having us.

CYNTHIA PROSEK: Thank you.

CATHY WURZER: Cynthia Prosek is the executive director of Restorative Justice Community Action, and Kara Beckman is a researcher at the Healthy Youth Development Prevention Research Center at the U of M.