New York City kids are in trouble.
Last year, youths were victimized at the highest levels since NYPD started officially collating their stats — including record numbers of kids who suffered rape, robbery, felony and misdemeanor assaults, and grand and petit larcenies.
Overall, we’ve seen a heartbreaking 71% increase in NYC minors victimized by major crimes in the past half-decade .
This doesn’t happen in a vacuum. NYC kids are hurt largely because they are sucked into a vortex of teens who behave badly — and who pressure or scare each other into behaving worse.
Indeed, last year was also record-setting for juvenile arrests for robbery, felony and misdemeanor assault, grand and petit larceny.
Gun arrests were up by a third in the past half-decade, while narcotics arrests rose a disastrous 81% since 2021.
Now the New York City Council, in its infinite non-wisdom, is looking to drag kids even further from the one skill that will help them avoid this maelstrom of criminality: behaving well.
With its renewed push to keep cops from collecting DNA samples from minors, the council would remove yet another deterrent to violence and delinquency from this vulnerable population.
The bill, now in committee and sponsored by progressive council members too dim to recognize the relationship between bad criminal justice policies and rising youth crime, would require the consent of parents, legal guardians, or attorney for pre-arrest DNA sampling of minors.
NYPD officials last month told councilmembers just how limited — and how critical — the current DNA collection regime is.
Officers only take “abandonment samples” from teens in relation to felony cases — and for kids under age 13, only for the most serious felonies. The only exceptions are for sex and hate crimes and gun cases.
Indeed, data shows that minors’ DNA is only being taken in conjunction with horrifying incidents, with three out of four related to gun arrests.
This is critical to public safety: Last year saw 500 youth gun arrestees — or 12% of the city’s total firearms arrests.
The sampling has played a crucial role in solving crimes by establishing guilt, as well as in proving innocence.
Further, despite NYC’s enormous boom in juvenile crime, police are still collecting a minuscule number of DNA samples from minors: just 174 abandonment samples in 2024 and only seven consent samples.
At a recent hearing on the policy, councilmembers like Althea Stevens bemoaned it as a barrier to “rebuild[ing] trust in black and brown communities.”
But she and other activists miss the equally critical need for youths to avoid criminality — and that is something DNA databases have a remarkably high ability to help.
Criminologist Jennifer Doleac has revealed the fantastic deterrent impact these databases have on individuals who got sucked into criminality.
Doleac’s 2020 analysis for the Manhattan Institute found that adding people convicted of a violent felony offense to a DNA database reduced the likelihood of another conviction within five years by an astounding 17%.
In another experiment, she found convicted felons added to a DNA database had an incredible 42% lower likelihood of a new conviction in the first year — and this improvement lasted for at least three years.
But most relevant for NYC’s crime-riddled youth: Doleac found these deterrent effects were strongest among the youngest offenders in her samples (those aged 18 to 23).
She also saw larger effects for first-time offenders than for recidivist criminals. “Adding people to the DNA database sooner, before they go too far down a criminal path, is more effective at changing their behavior,” she noted.
This is exactly what at-risk NYC teens need.
Amazingly, Doleac’s data showed that the positive shifts in behavior went beyond just avoiding crime.
For younger offenders, it seems to nudge them toward enrollment in educational and training programs, and from unemployment to gainful work.
Apparently, the knowledge that they may be held accountable for bad behavior pushes juveniles away from peers who will get them into trouble — and helps them thrive.
The City Council’s “progressives” ignore the evidenced reality that where NYPD officers have taken a step back, youths behave more self-destructively.
Following the pandemic, the NYPD no longer polices truancy. No wonder almost 35% of NYC’s public school students were chronically absent last school year, up from 25% before COVID-19 hit.
Not to mention that stop-and-frisk encounters, which deterred young New Yorkers from walking around with guns, were over 2,600% higher a decade-and-a-half ago — before juveniles became a larger portion of the city’s shooters.
New York’s kids deserve to have grown-ups in their lives who will push them toward better behavior.
Police are critical in ensuring those societal guardrails — and collecting limited DNA from minors at grave risk of a criminal future should be a no-brainer part of that role.
Hannah E. Meyers is a policing and public safety policy expert and former NYPD senior counterterrorism analyst.
