King County Prosecutor's Office discusses challenges of handling crime involving young suspects

So we have been covering a number of high-profile violent crimes over the last year, many of them involving teenage suspects. And some of those crimes, like the shooting deaths of two Rainier Beach High School students in January, went months without an arrest. So I'm joined now by Jamie Kivistad, the Assistant Chief of Juvenile Crimes Division at the King County Sheriff's Office. Good morning to you. Good morning. Thanks so much for coming in and an important conversation to have. So what are the challenges in bringing charges against these juvenile suspects? And how does your team work around the potential barriers there? Yeah, so our team, when we, at the prosecutor's office, when we receive charges, we are evaluating them. We are weighing what the law says and what the law requires, as well as what the evidence is that we have. We, as an office, have a requirement to file charges within 30 days of receiving them. Our office inside the juvenile division actually files them a lot more quickly. Obviously, with juveniles, you want to make a quick filing decision because you want to get in there and interrupt that behavior sooner rather than later. We have a lot of communication with law enforcement. We actually have a standing office hour every Tuesday at 1 o'clock. We call it J-Watch. It's on Teams. all of law enforcement, all of King County law enforcement have the standing invitation. They can come, drop in, ask a question, staff a case. We have two SPD crime analysts that are there every week. So we're constantly working with law enforcement to help them develop these cases to identify things that are missing, things that are needed, and to get those filing decisions as soon as possible. Now, Washington has a right to counsel law for juvenile suspects and witnesses. Can you explain that? And how does that factor into the difficulty of charging suspects? Right, that's the youth access to counsel law. So in certain circumstances, it requires law enforcement to give a juvenile access to an attorney so that they understand their rights, which I think we all agree is a good thing. And that can impact whether or not a juvenile decides to speak to law enforcement. It however, is not a requirement at all points of an investigation. And so again, we often do a lot of education with law enforcement so they understand that law, they understand when it applies, and they understand what other evidence could supplement if we don't have a statement from the juvenile. Now, it's interesting, too, because we've been told that despite the crimes that we report about in the news, crime is actually down in King County across the board. Now, is that also true for juvenile offenders? Well, for our class A violent crimes, our pre-pandemic levels, we're currently back at our pre-pandemic levels. So class A violent crimes, our gun violence crimes are at about 13% of our total crimes charged. They were in our previous school year, 14%. Again, when we saw that real big spike post-COVID, that was about 28%. We like to think that a lot of that is because after COVID, when we saw how destabilizing it was for youth, we did a lot of work. Lisa Manion specifically directed us to do a lot of work with our schools and we developed our safer school strategy. That was launched post COVID and a huge piece of the safer school strategy was to emphasize attendance and re-engagement for our youth in schools across the board. We are in regular communication with 20 school districts. We sit on threat assessment boards, we work with the school security staff, all sort of in this attempt to, again, reintegrate our youth in school and to recognize what a significant protective factor it is. Now, we do see a lot of arrests and charges on illegal possession of a firearm among young people. Why is that and why are these cases important to pursue? Right, well, we're definitely seeing that firearms are very accessible to our youth. I could hazard a guess that social media has a huge piece to play in that, right? The amount of communication, the way communication takes place. We identified about 10 youth that were previously charged with unlawful possession of a firearm that were then later charged with assault in the first degree or murder charges. So we know that it's devastating to public safety, it's devastating to the youth and to the community at large. We really want that arrest for unlawful possession of a firearm to be a moment of crisis and intervention for that youth. And so this is something you're pushing for, tougher consequences for these types of offenses, right? Our office definitely worked, I think it was House Bill 1536, to change gun law. Currently, a youth's first possession of gun law until their fifth possession is only punishable by up to 30 days of detention. So it's not to that fifth possession charge that they're looking at more significant consequences. Again, we don't necessarily think that a youth needs to be separated significantly from the community because of one of these convictions, but we do want sort of an emphasis on how significant it is. And we want to use an external motivator, right, to breed that internal motivation, that internal change, right, which is good for the youth and it's good for our community. For sure. Jamie Kivistad is the Assistant Chief of Juvenile Crimes at the King County Sheriff's Office. Thanks so much for your time. Yeah, thank you so much. Great to have you.