By: Boys & Girls Club of Elkhart
Kids who get involved with illegal activity like doing drugs or shoplifting generally don’t intend on becoming criminals. They simply don’t have anything else to do with the time between when they get home from school and when their parents get home.
In America, kids and teens under 18 are most likely to get in trouble between 3 and 6 p.m. on weekdays and in the summer months when they aren’t in school, according to Fight Crime: Invest in Kids.
About 63 percent of violent crime committed by kids happens on school days, and most of it happens between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m., U.S. Justice Department statistics show.
And it’s not just kids who are committing crimes — about a fifth of violent crimes involving kids who are victims happens between 3 and 7 p.m. Violent crimes committed against child victims are more likely to happen between 3 and 4 p.m. on a school day than any other time or day.
Elkhart Police don’t track the specific times that they deal with kids involved with crime, but Sgt. Chris Snyder said every Elkhart cop sees a noticeable increase in calls whenever kids are out of school.
“When kids aren’t in school or an environment that is structured, generally speaking, our calls for service increase,” he said. “Sometimes it’s just kids being kids, and we certainly understand that. Sometimes they’re at home and they’re playing basketball and their radio is turned up loud. Sometimes they just gather in large groups to hang out. Adults think something bad is happening, so we go out and talk to the kids.”
When Elkhart Police are dealing with juvenile crime, it’s not usually violent. Sometimes kids are charged with battery or homicide, but often it’s breaking curfew or shoplifting — crimes that get kids a court date and an arrest record.
“I don’t think anyone says ‘I want to be a criminal, I want to go to jail.’ I think some people say, ‘I can’t have this item, but if the opportunity is available to shoplift, now I can have that.’ And teens don’t have brain development to see the fact that it’s a crime and they’ll go to jail and there are consequences. I think they look at it as, ‘I want to have what my friends have and this is the avenue for me to get that.'”
Sometimes kids get involved in crime before they even realize that anything illegal is happening or when they don’t have a good excuse to say “no.”
“Kids who sit around and are bored might as well sit around with other kids who are sitting around bored. If someone says, ‘Hey, let’s smoke some weed’ or ‘let’s break into that house,’ kids don’t always have the willpower to say no or to realize that something bad could happen,” Snyder said. “It’s just, ‘I was walking down the street with Johnny and Billy and this is what we did.'”
In Snyder’s experience, the majority of kids he sees involved with crime in Elkhart have one thing in common: they don’t have after-school activities providing some sort of structure in their life. The kids who are involved in sports, band, drama club or an after-school activity don’t have the time to get into trouble.
“If you go to school, and then you go to an after-school program and you know that everyone else is counting on you to be part of that program, part of that is you have keep your grades up (to participate). Then you have that structure of school, after-school program, homework, then it’s bed time. And then you wake up the next day and start over. There’s that structure,” Snyder said. “When we see kids doing dumb things, it’s because they had nothing better to do. When you’re looking at kids in after-school activities, whatever that activity might be, generally speaking, they’re not the ones who are getting into trouble. I’m not saying there’s not some who make mistakes, but that structure helps everybody stay out of trouble.”
Boys & Girls Club of Elkhart keeps kids out of trouble by providing a fun and safe place for them to go after school. Support this mission by donating $25 today to the new Elkhart club!
