Wichita police say dealing with criminal kids has gotten harder since 2016 reforms
A woman and her two daughters woke up to a burglar rifling through their home. Another got doused with mace during a brazen carjacking attempt at a strip mall. A third, 82, suffered head injuries when three intruders who ransacked her home shoved her before taking her car for a joyride.
In another case, an unsuspecting employee got a note from a would-be robber claiming he had a bomb on him.
These attacks, all allegedly committed by 13- and 14-year-olds in Wichita over the past year, offer a glimpse into a new wave of juvenile crime local authorities say they’re having a difficult time dealing with. Frustrated with law changes it contends has made officers’ jobs harder, the Wichita Police Department has taken time lately to highlight offenses committed by kids in the hopes legislators and residents would take notice.
Local police officials, judges and prosecutors say the 2016 juvenile justice reforms meant to reduce recidivism and save the state money have also created problems with enforcement that impacts their ability to swiftly address youth offenders and curtail the chance they’ll commit future crimes. The reforms were meant to keep kids out of jail and place them in alternative programs, but those programs don’t always exist or have long waiting lists.
Other local officials and youth advocates say the statewide changes brought about by Senate Bill 367 are doing what they were meant to — reducing juvenile arrests and out-of-home placements. Kids do better and have less risk of offending in adulthood when they have fewer interactions with the criminal justice system early on.
The one thing most people involved seem to agree on, though, is that more programs designed to help troubled kids need to be created or expanded in the area.
The state, meanwhile, has promised to fund more programs within those communities using cost savings from the reforms. In 2017, for example, the state put $40 million aside, mostly cost savings from housing fewer offenders at juvenile facilities.
But many stakeholders complain that money has been slow in coming and in some cases existing programs have long waiting lists that keep kids from getting help until their court-ordered probation is almost over.
“The overall aim of the bill is either you send kids home or you send them to a juvenile correctional facility. There’s really no in between,” said Judge Patrick Walters, who presides over Sedgwick County District Court’s juvenile department. “... If you aren’t given the time to place these kids on probation and have them participate in programs and services to reduce their chances of recidivism, then you’re not really serving their needs or the needs of the community.”
‘Super criminals’
One police official, in an interview with The Eagle last year, said he worries the relaxed treatment of low-level juvenile offenders is churning out a generation of “super criminals” who don’t fear the justice system because their actions have no meaningful consequences.
Wichita police Deputy Chief Jose Salcido said he is bracing for a “new norm” where violence generally committed by older teens is commonplace among younger kids. In recent years, most haven’t gotten there until they were at least 15, he said.
Unless something changes, he predicts the city will soon see a notable increase in violent perpetrators who are 10 to 13 years old, an age group that typically only dabbles with truancy and low-level property crimes like shoplifting and breaking windows, if at all.
Ron Paschal, the Sedgwick County Deputy District Attorney who oversees the office’s juvenile offender and child-in-need-of-care programs, agreed that violent crime is up. But he said it may be too early to tell whether offenders are getting younger.
Before the reforms tied authorities’ hands, children could be arrested and taken to lock up when they were caught for those low- to mid-level offenses and judges could order sanctions that included quick dips in jail or group living situations. Those tactics, authorities argue, often deterred a kid from progressing to serious crimes like robberies, aggravated batteries, drive-by shootings and even murder.
But they go against broader research that shows kids who have more interactions with the juvenile justice system are at higher risk of offending as an adult.
Under the new law, those options are gone, replaced by limits on what police and judges can do to try to prevent more criminal activity. Instead, communities have been expected to find alternatives.
Now most kids arrested are quickly released to their parents or guardians, with a document telling them when to appear in court and a warning from the cops to stay out of trouble. Judges have little or no discretion to put those kids in jail anymore — unless they’ve committed the most serious offenses — and can only keep them on probation for a few months, with orders to attend programs or treatment.
“It seems like (Senate Bill) 367 wants us to process these kids as quickly as possible without having them evaluated for services or participate in services,” said Walters, the juvenile court judge. With low-risk offenders, “we’re not supposed to really do anything. We’re supposed to let these kids back out in the community not even with probation.”
For juveniles with a moderate risk of reoffending “we’re supposed to try to find alternative programs and place them on probation so they can participate in those services and programs to lower their chances of recidivism,” he said.
But he doesn’t think that works in a lot of cases. He wants judges to have more freedom to decide what each juvenile offender needs.
“I’d like to see the probation terms lengthened (and) the case length limits lengthened so we would be able to have some encouragement. Now the kids know when the probation or the case length limit ends because we put that on the record at the time of sentencing. And if they can just dodge us for six to nine months, we can’t do anything.”
‘Same names over and over’
The majority of kids get the message. Overall juvenile arrest and detention numbers in the county are down. Only the most violent kids and accused sex offenders who have nowhere else to go are held in custody at the Sedgwick County Juvenile Detention Facility, according to Walters and the head of the county’s corrections department, Glenda Martens.
Before the law changes, a kid could be held at the detention facility “for any reason at all” including probation violations and running away from home, Steve Stonehouse, the county correction’s deputy director for juvenile services, said in a recent Eagle interview that included Martens.
“The kids that are in detention are the right kids that should be in detention,” Martens said, noting that on a recent day the number of kids in the juvenile jail at 700 S. Hydraulic were the lowest the county had ever seen.
“That’s a very positive thing.”
Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett acknowledged that arrests and detention numbers are down. But he said that isn’t due to “a change in philosophy where we all decided ... to be more selective” about who goes to jail.
The law “just doesn’t allow it,” he said.
“I’m not looking to lock everybody up. But there’s got to be some consequences.”
Police think for some the softer approach is encouraging more bad behavior, and ultimately creating repeat offenders. Lt. Chad Beard, head of the Wichita Police Department’s gang unit and felony assault section, said officers now see “a lot of the same names over and over.”
Paschal said prosecutors are “seeing the same kid more often,” too, as new criminal cases cross their desks.
Last spring, for example, the cops arrested a 14-year-old boy three times in a single weekend for breaking into cars in Wichita and Derby. With no option to put him in jail, police released him each time they caught him only to find him committing the same crimes later.
Cases like this frustrate neighbors and victims who don’t understand how a kid who broke into their vehicle recently is free to do it again so soon, Beard said.
Another teen last year, this one a 13-year-old girl, kept turning up at a motel on south Broadway, an area that’s a hotbed of crime, after running away from her foster care placement. That contributed to 13 police cases she racked up in a two-month time period and more than 40 interactions with the department overall, police said. Her brother, also in foster care, had more than 50 interactions with police at the time of Salcido’s interview, including 14 new cases he received in a single month.
At least once, Salcido said the officers caught the girl carrying methamphetamine.
“We’ll go arrest them ... and sometimes they’re out before the officers are back to the station,” Salcido said of juvenile offenders.
“We are literally hitting our heads against the wall because we’re so frustrated.”
Salcido worries the runaway foster care girl may be a victim of human trafficking and could wind up dead or a perpetrator herself. But there’s nothing immediate police can do but take her home when they find her at the motel.
Not being able to help kids like that “is demoralizing,” Salcido said.
Overusing detention
But not everyone agrees that the law changes are a problem.
Advocates for juvenile offenders point out that national research shows kids do better when they have fewer interactions with police and the criminal court system and their problems are treated in their own communities amid familiar surroundings.
They say a handful of anecdotes about law enforcement difficulties don’t justify bringing back an antiquated system that detained kids too often.
“We were dramatically overusing detention in Kansas before implementing these changes,” said Mike Fonkert, director of Kansas Appleseed’s Just Campaign, which seeks reforms to the state’s child welfare, juvenile justice and criminal justice systems.
The notion that no consequences exist for low-level offenders “is inaccurate,” he added. Most end up serving time on probation or diversion that has requirements they have to meet to complete the program, he pointed out.
“If folks are feeling like they don’t have an option for a child, that isn’t an indicator that this reform needs to be changed as much as it’s an indication that whatever community they’re in needs to come together to figure out what gaps exist and how they can fill those gaps.”
But many opponents of the 2016 reforms as written warned the changes took away too much, too quickly without having a ready-built replacement waiting to go, leaving counties scrambling to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
Bennett, the Sedgwick County District Attorney, spoke out when the reforms were still under consideration by lawmakers. He likened eliminating the old juvenile justice system the way the state did to tearing up the Kansas Turnpike without first building another road for travelers.
He’s “not against improving the system” to benefit children and help close off the juvenile-to-adult crime pipeline, he said. His concern, rather, was with “the wholesale dump of the law that had been in place for many, many years.”
“We should have taken it one step at a time and evaluated the successes of each modification. It would have been more cost-effective to implement in that way, and in my opinion, we would have had the ability when we started moving in this direction to have at our disposal a lot of these community-based programs that we needed to go along this path.”
Although the juvenile justice reforms were passed into law in 2016, many people still refer to them by their Senate bill number, 367. Controversial among law enforcement, judges and prosecutors even then for what they sought to take away, the reforms focused on replacing incarceration and out-of-home placements with community-based programs that offenders could attend without being in custody.
They also placed limits on how long juvenile offenders could be under the court’s purview, eliminated judicial discretion in many cases, and no longer let police take low-level offenders to lock up.
Proponents of the bill liked the drastic drop in arrest numbers and the promise of saving millions on housing costs at expensive juvenile detention facilities and group homes, like the now-closed Judge Riddel Boys Ranch near Goddard. The per-inmate cost of housing a child in the state juvenile prison is more than five times as much as housing an adult inmate — $154,285 compared to $30,100 last year, according to the Kansas Department of Corrections’ latest annual report.
“Detention isn’t a good place for kids. It’s trauma,” Martens, the Sedgwick County corrections director, said.
Stonehouse agreed.
“Kids have worse outcomes when they come here. It’s just the way it is. So we try to divert them as much as we can.”
‘Best intentions’
As part of the 2016 reforms, the state promised to reinvest its cost savings into evidence-based community programs that reduce recidivism.
But it also revealed gaps as many communities have been ill-prepared to deal with juvenile offenders in new ways.
In Sedgwick County, for example, officials are still working to figure out exactly what the community needs to keep kids out of trouble and treat the issues that drive them to commit crimes. The availability of help programs that assess and serve kids quickly are at the heart of discussions. Some already exist but may only serve a small number of juveniles, leading to waiting lists that sometimes outlast the amount of time a youth offender can now stay under the court’s jurisdiction.
“It doesn’t do them any good to sit on a waiting list for 30, 60, 90, 120 days, only to put them into a program at the last minute,” Paschal said.
In some cases, money from the state to create or expand such programs has been slow coming.
A January 2020 performance audit report evaluating the effects of Senate Bill 367 found that while the reforms reduced placement of juvenile offenders in out-of-home settings — dropping from 4,400 kids in 2015 to about 400 in 2019 — and set aside $40 million to fund community-based programming, less than a quarter of the earmarked money had been spent. The audit also found that while community-based programs were generally available across the state, more may be needed. The main reason cited in the audit report for inadequate programming was a lack of qualified staff.
Going forward, the Kansas Department of Corrections plans to invest around $22 million a year in new community programs and services for juvenile offenders, including investing in new substance abuse programs and family counseling services, according to the audit report.
The Wichita Police Department has already explored options for helping to address the juvenile crime problem. In September, it launched a new Juvenile Intervention Unit in collaboration with Sedgwick County Juvenile Services that aims to use proactive means like crime deterrence, diversion, restorative justice and connecting families with resources to keep children on the straight and narrow.
The department has also discussed holding a mini police academy for kids to learn how the justice system works.
Salcido, the police deputy chief, said he also wants to see programs that can help kids fix the underlying problems that drive them into delinquency.
To him, that means identifying what’s “broken in the family.”
He thinks inpatient drug treatment in a secure facility would help the foster care girl who keeps ending up at the South Broadway motel, carrying meth, for example.
Beard said he would like to see more after-school programs, especially on the middle school level, to help keep kids out of trouble as well as more resources provided to families and single parents, like transportation for youth to activities. He also thinks putting police officers back in middle and even elementary schools would not only provide resources for school staff, but also mentors for kids.
At an online forum hosted this past fall by Progeny, a local nonprofit partnership focused on changing the juvenile justice landscape and reinvesting in community-based alternatives, one former juvenile offender suggested more free options to keep youth busy since many troubled kids come from families already struggling to provide for their day-to-day needs. Free memberships to clubs or gyms were among ideas.
Other stakeholders want to increase the number of available beds for kids at in-patient drug rehabilitation and mental health facilities, so offenders have the chance to get evaluated and treated more quickly.
“They had the best intentions with the juvenile justice reform. But they didn’t put the resources in place to be able to effectively carry it out,” Salcido said of lawmakers. “The state touted we’re going to save this many millions. But where are they so we can help these kids?”
