Boy, 10, charged after driving stolen car near crowded Minneapolis playground

MicroWave@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 139 points – Boy, 10, charged after driving stolen car near crowded Minneapolis playground
cbsnews.com

Minneapolis police arrested a 10-year-old boy for allegedly driving a stolen vehicle near a school playground last month — and it's not the boy's first brush with the law, police said.

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It's not exactly hard to point to these incidents and say "the damn kid did it because he's 10 and has parents that are absent due to jobs or mental health reasons".

The boy won't get the help he needs because it's not there. And there's a certain political group that gets off on the idea of people having no help, because they didn't need it and did fine.

Police booked the 10-year-old into the Hennepin County Juvenile Detention Center Thursday. According to the department, this is at least his third arrest and he is a suspect in a dozen cases ranging from "auto theft to robbery to assault with a dangerous weapon."

O'Hara said charges were also approved against the boy in an August attempted carjacking.

Precocious little urchin.

That's the boy screaming for help. I wonder what his home life is like, can't be good with these types of attention seeking behaviors.

I'm trying to imagine getting car-jacked by a 10 year old and it just keeps getting funnier. Man... that poor kid is an idiot, but at 10 there's no way this is his fault.

I'm trying to imagine getting car-jacked by a 10 year old and it just keeps getting funnier.

Well, he's 10 now, but it sounds like that was a prior incident, so I suppose he could have been younger at that point.

8 year old trying to steal your car with a nerf blaster painted black...

He has assault with a dangerous weapon charges in there (which I assume is Minnesota's term for what is "deadly weapon" here), so I'd guess that he was using a gun or maybe a knife against someone in at least one of his prior incidents, so I'd give reasonable odds that if he was using a weapon in the attempted carjacking, it wasn't a Nerf gun.

EDIT: Yeah. Minnesota criminal code:

https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/609.02

Subd. 6.Dangerous weapon.

"Dangerous weapon" means any firearm, whether loaded or unloaded, or any device designed as a weapon and capable of producing death or great bodily harm, any combustible or flammable liquid or other device or instrumentality that, in the manner it is used or intended to be used, is calculated or likely to produce death or great bodily harm, or any fire that is used to produce death or great bodily harm.

And if he has assault charges, he would have been using on someone, not just carrying it.

(Obviously I was being facetious, but a bit of clarification on how bullshit these laws are: )

Not familiar with Minnesota legal code, but in the states I am familiar with, assault is threatening with a weapon, not battery or attempted. Most jurisdictions I am experienced with also include threats with a weapon that was presented to the victim as deadly in the same category, so airsoft or other props count the same as a functional weapon.

Sure, he was arrested, but the playground cred he just earned is going to carry him long beyond any incarceration.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that this isn't the nicest neighborhood in the world, and there are probably other kids on the playground getting up to their own shennanigans.

kagis for North Minneapolis

https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/25/us/minneapolis-crime-defund-invs/index.html

A feeling of lawlessness, a sense of neglect

Residents of the north side describe a landscape that can feel lawless. Indeed, about 60% of police calls for shots fired this year have come from the area, even though it makes up just 15% of the population, according to city data.

Paul Johnson, 56, said young men openly sell drugs during the day in public places, such as a gas station on Broadway Avenue that has been dubbed the “murder station” due to all of the fatal shootings there. (It is near the one where Blair was killed.)

“You pull up to get gas – they try to sell you drugs,” he said. “And not just three or four, but it’s a bulk of people.”

The perception among many residents is that the police ignore the area.

“They just let it go on,” said Johnson’s friend, Brian Bogan, 42, who said he moved from north Minneapolis to relatively safer St. Paul due to his kids growing up in an area where they don’t know if “it’s fireworks or gunshots.”

https://www.fox9.com/news/are-crime-maps-holding-back-north-minneapolis

Red all over

CoreLogic’s map for North Minneapolis shows an enormous swath of red from Golden Valley Road to the south, spanning the length of seven neighborhoods: Near North, Willard-Hay, Jordan, Hawthorne, Folwell, McKinley, and Camden.

Nearly the entire northwest side of the city is saturated in crimson red.

CoreLogic says the red zone means the area has up to five times the national average for property and violent crime.

https://kstp.com/kstp-news/top-news/mpd-chief-hennepin-county-attorney-spar-over-referral-of-juvenile-crime-cases/

MPD chief, Hennepin County attorney spar over referral of juvenile crime cases

One day after a drive-by shooting injured four kids in north Minneapolis, the Hennepin County attorney and Minneapolis police chief are sparring over strategies to stop the cycle of juvenile crime.

Police said the four victims were inside a stolen Kia around 1 a.m. Sunday when automatic gunfire erupted from a vehicle following them on West Broadway Avenue.

Two boys and two girls between the ages of 11 and 14 were injured, and one girl who was shot in the head was brought to the hospital in critical condition. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said on Monday that all of the victims were expected to survive.

“I think, in a lot of ways, we are failing to deter this activity,” O’Hara said the night of the shooting. “Two of the five juveniles involved in this incident were arrested not even two weeks ago for being in a stolen car.”

Yeah.