Garner says juvenile complaints on rise
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By Dave Taylor
Lewisport Police Chief says that juvenile complaints in his city and countywide are increasing, which is not just a bad sign of things to come, but it’s also a drain on departments who handle the growing number of calls.
“I started to see a sharp rise in it last year,” Garner said. “It started last year, just having more and more juvenile complaints, and the trend’s continuing on through 2020 so far, but it’s only February.”
The complaints are much the same as other years, just in greater quantity.
“(It’s) just everything: criminal mischief, theft, out of control. It’s just a lot of stuff,” he said. “We’ve had probably more juvenile-related thefts in the past year than we’ve had in any one year.”
“We went through a rash of moped thefts last year,” he said. “That boiled down to the same three to five juveniles that were involved.
A lot of the calls are about kids vandalizing or just damaging property as they go.
“Just tearing up property to see what they can do,” he said. “Of course that’s causing a monetary loss to the business or the homeowner, whoever may be the victim in it. And then the thefts of course, is costing them a lot too.”
“Actually our thefts are either from vehicles or they’re stealing the vehicles themselves,” he said. “We’ve had I know one for sure and maybe two actual vehicle thefts and I think the sheriff’s office has had one or two.”
There’s no single reason for the spike in complaints, but more like a convergence of multiple factors, he said.
“Probably over the last six, seven, eight years, Lewisport’s been a very transient city,” he said. “You have a lot of rental property and things of that nature so you have a lot of people that are in and out. We have more of that than we’ve ever had.”
Sometimes it’s new families who haven’t been in the area long who bring along troubled juveniles, although Garner said it’s probably an even split between transient kids and those who are from long established local families.
“A lot of it is just lack of accountability and no supervision,” he said.
Taking on more calls takes up more time, not just for Lewisport but for Hawesville and the sheriff’s office, and that time is getting longer with more regulations on how to handle juveniles.
“It takes up a lot of man hours to deal with it,” he said. “And the paperwork process, they’re trying to make it even worse.”
Incidents are reported to family court, where court designated workers are assigned to the child’s case, and if a juvenile is removed from the home for a crime, they go either to Owensboro or Bowling Green, and must be transported there.
More than just police dealing with the juveniles, Garner said he hopes that parents or guardians will also be working to stem the growing tide of juvenile problems, using old fashioned methods.
“Just be a parent, which is a hard job,” he said. “And that’s where a lot of the beyond control comes from is those parents or grandparents that are trying to do something and the juvenile’s rebelling against that.”
dave.hancockclarion
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