The Governor’s Office wants to focus on the numbers, showing a statewide decline in young people committing certain crimes, like a 26% decline in decline in juvenile homicide arrests, and 46% decline in non-fatal shootings of juveniles.
And the Department of Juvenile Services secretary highlights the fact that the majority of children on GPS monitoring don’t re-offend.
“92% is not a bad record. It’s just the 8% drives a lot of the conversation,” DJS Secretary Vincent Schiraldi told WMAR-2 News in a recent interview.
But when the anecdotes driving the conversation involve the sounds of a woman screaming for help while a group of kids try to rob her, as seen in Ring camera footage below, or videos like the one that went viral at the end of September , showing teenagers attacking a 66-year-old man in Butcher’s Hill while he was lying face-down in the street, people get angry.
https://x.com/ElizWorthNews/status/1851260887169921316
A petition calling for Secretary Schiraldi to be fired has more than 3,000 signatures. The heads of 9 Baltimore City neighborhood associations sent a letter to Governor Moore demanding the same.