On the sunny last Saturday of March, 6-year-old Inez O’Brien and her mom Ellena headed home to Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn after going out for mother-daughter haircuts.
They exited the J train at Halsey Street, planning to pop into a bodega on their way.
As they passed PS 137, Inez’s school, they saw a group of five pre-teens, all about 11 or 12, who were obviously out to make trouble.
The kids had surrounded a car in the street and were bashing it with the plastic barrels of their Nerf toy guns.
Once the car sped off, the gang looked for a fresh target.
“Let’s get that lady, now!” one shouted.
They swarmed Inez and her mom, shoving the Nerf guns in their faces and firing pellets at painfully close range.
One gun hit Inez in the mouth, bruising her lip.
“Stop, this is scaring us!” Ellena cried, as she pushed the toys away.
But one kid succeeded in whacking Ellena’s head before the group ran off.
Ellena went to the hospital and needed five staples to close the bloody gash.
There, she met a food deliveryman with a punched-in face who had apparently encountered the same kids.
At home, Inez was hysterical.
Her little brother, age 4, saw his mom drenched in blood and vomited.
When patrol officers drove Ellena around the neighborhood, she identified two of the attackers.
One youth — 120 pounds and five-foot-two — was charged with felony assault for pummeling Ellena with “intent to cause serious physical injury.”
But NYPD’s juvenile desk had to release the adult-sized thug “due to age.”
And that’s it.
No follow-up, and certainly no justice.
“We want accountability,” Ellena’s husband Matt told me.
“What’s going on? It’s a horrible thing that kids can just run up and assault a woman and her child.”
But that’s exactly what New York now encourages.
In recent years, wilding — youths wreaking random, group violence just for the exhilaration of it — has increased because the consequences for it have evaporated.
“There’s more wilding because we made it clear that we will cut kids every break,” a former Bronx prosecutor lamented.
“The system is set up to get kids out of the system.”
In 2018, the statewide “Raise the Age” law largely removed criminal consequences for 16- and 17-year-olds.
Since then, any misdemeanors they commit and 83% of their felonies land in Family Court — including 75% of violent felonies.
The victims of these crimes cannot even discover the outcomes.
Worse, in 2022 Gov. Kathy Hochul signed “Raise the Lower Age,” an insane statute that made offenders between ages 7 and 11 no longer eligible to be charged as “juvenile delinquents.”
Even if an 11-year-old shoots or stabs another kid in front of his school — anything short of a “completed murder” — he can’t be taken into custody.
What happens to him?
His family gets offered voluntary social services.
That’s it.
“You can’t even put them in a police car — even if they fired a gun,” said Kevin O’Connor, a former NYPD assistant commissioner for youth strategies. “There’s no criminal recourse anymore.”
Because they are no longer processed, we have no idea how many crimes are committed by kids under age 11.
But in 2021, before this law gave youths infinite license to ill, there were 150 such arrests in New York state, including 50 for assault.
The state’s Office of Court and Family Services promises that the new “differential response services” voluntarily offered to young offenders provide “opportunities and supports that promote racial, ethnic, and gender equity, and overall well-being.”
I doubt the two girls in the group that attacked little Inez just needed some good ol’ fashioned “gender equity support” to whip them into shape.
Compounding these “reforms” is a murky family court system that gives the Department of Probation enormous control over youths’ fate.
In Ellena’s case, Probation would have decided whether her sole detained attacker was simply diverted into social services, rather than face any criminal consequences.
How effective are these services?
How often do kids cycle through them?
No. One. Knows.
No wonder NYC’s youth arrests are up 69% over the past five years, while youth felony assault, like Ellena experienced, is up 119%.
That group of kids went home to their beds after a fun day of terrorizing innocent citizens purely for the jollies.
They have no fear of repercussions, reproach or even stigma.
They will do it again.
Meanwhile, Inez couldn’t sleep that night.
She didn’t want to leave her house or go to the park.
New York is choosing to put innocent kids in danger.
Our laws now fail to differentiate between fear that makes the world seem malicious and unstable — like the attack that traumatized Inez — and fear of consequences that enforce societal rules and boundaries.
Inez, and all New York kids, deserve better.
Hannah E. Meyers is a fellow and the director of policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute.
