The Evening Star (January 5, 1946)
Editorial: Juvenile crime wave
For the second time in recent weeks President Truman has directed attention to the “alarming” increase in juvenile crime which has marked the war years and which continues unabated. He urged the 700 delegates to the Miami convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police to concentrate on this problem, after J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had warned the police officials that a major post-war wave of gangsterism, spearheaded by young hoodlums, may be expected unless drastic remedial measures are taken at once. And Mr. Truman has followed up his appeal to the police with a letter advising Attorney General Tom Clark of his “deep concern” over the situation.
The president, the attorney general, the FBI and the police have good reason to be alarmed over the juvenile delinquency outlook. Mr. Truman noted that some categories of juvenile crime have increased more than 350 percent since Pearl Harbor, and Mr. Hoover told the police chiefs that arrests of “bobby sox” age girls have jumped nearly 200 percent since 1939, while arrests of boys under 18 have increased 48 percent in murder cases, 70 percent in criminal assault cases and 101 percent in offenses involving drunkenness or drunken driving. And the trend upward goes on all over the country, according to police reports.
It was with such shocking statistics as these before him that Attorney General Clark has moved to set up in the Department of Justice an entirely new bureau, charged specifically with studying the causes of this upsurge of youthful lawlessness and devising means to combat it. As a corollary of the department’s action, Mr. Clark has proposed that agencies and groups interested in the problem be invited to attend a national conference on the subject here in the near future, a plan which meets with the wholehearted endorsement of the president. Such a conference is desirable not only because it should result in a coordinated attack on the problem by public and private agencies but because the attendant national publicity should help to arouse parents to their responsibilities in the crisis. That it is vital to bring home to each individual parent his obligations as model and guide there can be no doubt. Law enforcement authorities lay the burden of blame for the rise in juvenile crime on wartime laxity in parental discipline, due to disrupted homes and wartime preoccupation of parents with other duties. Unless there is full cooperation from parents, the officials will be waging their anticrime battle under almost insuperable handicaps.