Juvenile arrest rate at new low

OLYMPIA – Washington’s juvenile arrest rate has fallen to its lowest level in more than 20 years, state officials said Tuesday.

“It’s great news,” said Mary Williams, office chief for the governor’s Juvenile Justice Advisory Committee. Annually, the committee said, about one out of every 20 children ages 10 through 17 is arrested.

The news seems particularly good in Kitsap and San Juan counties, where the rate is lower than one child out of 30. And it’s greater still in Skamania and Wahkiakum counties, with juvenile arrest rates are now lower than one in 70.

So how do we stack up locally?

Impossible to say, according to the committee. The Spokane Police Department, one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the state, is one of three that don’t disclose juvenile arrest data. The others are remote Ferry County and scenic Island County, in Puget Sound.

For three years in a row, Williams said, the Spokane Police Department hasn’t filed the data, which are collected by the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs. “It’s our understanding that it’s a staffing issue within the department,” she said.

Every other law enforcement agency in Spokane County, however, has managed to collect the statistics.

Efforts to reach Assistant Chief Jim Nicks or association officials for comment Tuesday were unsuccessful. But Police Chief Roger Bragdon has for two years been urging public patience with a department that he has repeatedly said is understaffed.

Bragdon said recently that in June alone, more than 200 calls to 911 – including several domestic violence reports – went unanswered because the city had no officer available to dispatch. Due to budget cuts, the city’s Crime Check phone system for reporting property crimes and other violations, which once ran 24 hours a day, now operates less than half time.

“Generally, the case is that we are hanging on by our fingernails,” Bragdon said in late July.

Elsewhere in the region, according to the state report, Pend Oreille County’s juvenile arrest rate was about one in 27. Stevens County was on par with the state average, at about one arrest per 20 kids. Whitman County’s was about one in 12 juveniles.

Throughout the state, most of the arrests are for property crimes or violations involving drugs or alcohol. Annually, only one out of 500 children is arrested for a violent crime. That’s less than half the rate of such arrests in the early 1980s.

Part of the reason for the decreasing arrest rates, Williams believes, is a series of counseling programs and other anti-delinquency measures the state has launched since the late 1990s.

“The Legislature has put their money where the research showed it would make a difference” by deterring future crimes, she said.

Under one “Functional Family Therapy” program, a counselor visits the home of juvenile offenders to draw the entire family into efforts to prevent future misbehavior. Another program sends offenders to a 10-week class designed to help them resolve disputes peacefully and take responsibility for their actions.

In addition, the committee last year handed out about $3 million in smaller grants to dozens of anti-crime juvenile programs across the state.

The lower arrest rates reported Tuesday mirror what appears to be a long-running nationwide decline in crime. The U.S. Justice Department reported on Sunday that the nation’s crime rate was unchanged last year, holding at the lowest levels since the government began surveying crime victims in 1973.

Many explanations have been suggested for the decline in violent crime, which according to victim surveys has fallen by 57 percent nationwide since 1993. Experts point to the record-high prison population of more than 2 million people, to the addition of 100,000 police officers since the mid-1990s, and to a possible deterrent effect on street crime as a result of anti-terrorism measures.