GREEN BAY, Wis. (NBC 26) -- After a string of youth crimes across Northeast Wisconsin made headlines at the end of August, NBC 26 wanted to raise the question of a possible trend in our area.
Chief Andrew Smith, who joined the Green Bay Police Department in early 2016, says he's never seen so many political protests here, especially youth-involved.
"Well it seems to me that the lot of young people were cooped up in their houses like we all were during March, April and May, and then as things opened up a little bit during the summer we had the George Floyd incident, and then we had all the protests," Chief Smith said. "And when we saw those protests, we saw many many young people come out and stand shoulder to shoulder and protest -- which is their right to do, which is fine -- but then we also saw some of the criminal activities."
Specifically regarding youth crimes, Chief Smith noted that Green Bay always has a 10 p.m. curfew in place that applies to anyone under 17 years old.
"We use that as a tool to bring children home when they're out in the streets running around at night and they're causing problems," Chief Smith said. "We bring them back to their parents, generally. Usually we don't cite them, sometimes we have to prove it becomes a habitual ongoing problem with a certain individual. We'll give them the citation and and let them deal with that in the court."
When a protest against racial injustice organized by teenagers over Snapchat on August 29 deviated into unlawful assembly in downtown Green Bay that evening, the youngest detainee was 11 years old.
Chief Smith says that the police department always makes an effort to connect with protest organizers to establish clear rules for demonstration and curfew.
"We were obligated to take action and ended up detaining some youngsters, cited, and you call their parents to have them come and pick them up," Chief Smith said about youth protesters on August 29 that ended up demonstrating outside the police station after 10 p.m. "And that's going to be our strategy going forward. Let's make sure everybody knows what the rules are, make sure that they protest by the rules that we've set up that we as a police department -- we as a society -- have set up, and if they violate those rules then that becomes a criminal act and not a civil disobedience act, then we'll go ahead and and take immediate action."
Beyond unlawful assemblies, Chief Smith says they're seen a noticeable increase in graffiti, an "almost exclusively youth crime."
Two cited incidents included vandalism outside the Daily Buzz coffee shop and Broken Spoke bike store. One of the kids cited, a 14-year-old girl, was detained that same evening for unlawful assembly.
Chief Smith thinks that the coronavirus precautions keeping Green Bay public school students out of the physical classrooms right now may be contributing to the criminal outbursts.
"Every year in Green Bay, we would see a nice drop off in our crime right as school started, because the kids would be getting up early and they'd have to go to school. They'd be in school a good percentage of the day and they were around other authority figures at school," Chief Smith said. "And that really helped. I'm not sure that's going to happen this year was kids really aren't in school for the most part."
Oshkosh Police Department provided NBC 26 with data that says while there were 414 youth crimes recorded in 2019, there have only been 228 recorded in 2020 before August. That is very slightly below last year's rate.
