A new task force to tackle youth violence was announced Tuesday by Orange-Osceola State Attorney Monique Worrell amid recent cases involving teens accused of deadly incidents.<\/p>\n
Called \u201cThe Missing Middle,\u201d the task force will be comprised of law enforcement, school officials, prosecutors and community advocates working in neighborhoods hardest hit by youth violence, Worrell told reporters.<\/p>\n
It comes after what she called in an uptick in youth violence in Orange and Osceola counties as well as across the state. Recent arrests of teens in her circuit include a 16-year-old charged as an adult after allegedly shooting another teen in the head<\/a> near downtown Orlando and another teen charged with killing a woman babysitting a child<\/a> in west Orlando.<\/p>\n The task force\u2019s mission will be to explore legislative solutions as well as community programming for at-risk youth.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are going to where they are to meet them, so we can deal with them before they get to me,\u201d Worrell said. \u201cBy the time they get to me, it\u2019s generally too late, and now I have to make a decision.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the last 15 years, Worrell said felony cases involving youth suspects have not dropped as steeply as the overall number of cases. About 1,000 such felonies were forwarded to the State Attorney\u2019s Office in 2025 compared to 1,300 in 2010, a much smaller drop than the 61% decrease in total felonies.<\/p>\n In addition, while youth felony arrests in the Ninth Judicial Circuit in Orange and Osceola dropped last year compared to the one before, it also saw a 20% increase in cases involving murder and attempted murder, according to the latest data published to a Florida Department of Juvenile Justice dashboard.<\/p>\n The Missing Middle initiative comes from what Worrell and others believe is a gap between how youth offenders are handled in the juvenile justice system versus the adult prisons, where the focus is more on incarceration rather than rehabilitation.<\/p>\n When deciding how to charge a young offender, Worrell says her prosecutors are \u201cpresented a difficult choice between two inadequate options.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf rehabilitation isn\u2019t a goal and we send them away for 10, 15, 20 or 25 years, they\u2019re still coming home and they\u2019re going to be pretty young when they get back into our community,\u201d she said. \u201cWhat is that going to look like when the prison has raised them? These are the problems that I\u2019m our task force will find solutions to.\u201d<\/p>\n Worrell has made violent crimes, especially by youth, a cornerstone of her second term as state attorney, launching early on what\u2019s known as the \u201cYour Future, Your Choice\u201d initiative, which educates teens on the criminal justice system while offering summer internships to high schoolers. Fifty students took part in the internship last year, she said, with another 70 applications awaiting review for this summer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new task force to tackle youth violence was announced Tuesday by Orange-Osceola State Attorney Monique Worrell amid…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":241102,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[112,114,266,115,139,141,140,109],"class_list":["post-241101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-crime-and-public-safety","tag-latest-headlines","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news","tag-social"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241101\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/241102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}