New Jersey is seeing a dramatic rise in youth gun violence and a “paradigm shift” in the gang activity that enables it, according to testimony heard at a public hearing convened by the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation on Sept. 26.

According to data from the New Jersey State Police between 2015 and 2017 there was a 26 percent increase in juvenile gun possession arrests across the state.  Over the same period in Trenton there was a 243 percent increase in the number of juvenile shooting victims.

Law enforcement officials testified the latest round of gang activity is being driven by middle school aged teenagers and even some children as young as eight years old.

The SCI heard from Edwin Torres, an SCI investigator who testified that— unlike gangs like the Blood and Crips that were focused on making money selling illegal drugs and using violence as a way to advance that enterprise— the younger gangs were solely focused on winning notoriety for their violent exploits by posting them on social media.

Torres told the panel that while handguns were what these younger gangs were usually getting their hands on, there were instances where rifles, shotguns and even assault weapons were part of their arsenal as well as hollow-tipped so called “cop killer” bullets and large capacity magazines.

“They are more dangerous now than the traditional gangs,” he said. “They have weaponized social media and pose a clear and present danger to the public safety.”

“Children as young as 12 or 14 years old. Children who are picking up guns to kill and maim each other and anyone else who might get in the way,” Lee Seglem, SCI’s long-time executive director said in his opening statement. “This is the dark and ruthless world of neighborhood gangs and juvenile gun violence…. It is a chaotic world where law enforcement is struggling to catch up, and it is a world where kids grow up expecting to die in violence.”

He continued, “While it is true that the crime rate in general has dropped or at least remained static in recent years, what is happening within and among this particular social subset defies that conventional wisdom.”

The SCI panel heard from commission staff that around the state prosecutors report they have a hard time detaining the most violent youth offenders and that existing pre-trial alternatives to detention are failing to prevent the young defendants from re-offending before their underlying case is resolved.

In Atlantic City between 2014 and 2017 there were 46 gang related shootings involving 36 juveniles. On Easter weekend in 2016 there was shoot-out between two of these youth gangs on the 47th floor of the Taj Mahal that left four youngsters wounded.

But witnesses testified this upsurge in younger gang violence extends beyond the boundaries of New Jersey’s urban core which has been ignored by Trenton Republicans and only seen as vote ‘plantations’ by the Democratic machines that  usually run their politics.

Chief Donna Higbee, leads the Galloway Twp. Police Department, a rural/suburban community that’s 7 miles west of Atlantic City. She told the SCI panel her department is confronting the same gang problem. “Inner city crime is no longer in a bubble to itself,” she said.

Higbee noted the uptick in youth gang activity was not happening in a vacuum. “With the changing economy, with natural disasters like Sandy, and foreclosures especially specific to Atlantic County we are seeing the relocation of a lot of families,” she said. “We are seeing families struggling to get out of poor situations moving their children out into the suburbs….”

Since its creation in 1969 the SCI, an independent agency,  has had an impressive track record taking on a wide range of issues from abuses in the bail bond industry to the role of organized crime in the state’s solid waste and recycling industry.

The agency is still in the fact gathering stage of this critical investigation that will generate their final report. No doubt, there has to be a real urgency to this. Lives are at stake.

My concern is that in the process of zeroing in on this latest crisis we will neglect to account for the confluence of history when it comes to how we got to this tipping point where children are arming themselves.

You can’t ignore the steady stream of violence infused in our popular culture and you can’t turn a blind an eye to decades of a racist war on drugs that incarcerated thousands and thousands of men of color leaving an army of grandparents to raise a generation of children with missing parents.

And then there’s the ravages of the Great Recession that hit African-American households the hardest. It’s sadly ironic that while an African-American won the White House, so many African-Americans lost their homes.

In the great housing collapse of 2008 the Bush/Obama administrations bailed out the very Wall Street banks whose greed set the stage for the liquidation of $20 trillion in American household wealth. The perpetrators of the greatest bank heist in history were protected, never prosecuted, and are now free to continue showering campaign cash on their pet politicians.

Their corrupt legacy is manifested in the thousands of zombie homes throughout much of New Jersey where today’s wannabe young gangsters find sanctuary.

When you let your cities hollow out that’s what happens. Foreclosure has generational consequences.