At least eight youths have been killed thus far in 2023, according to The Post. As casualty numbers go up, ages come down. Arianna Davis, shot on Mother’s Day while riding in a car on Hayes Street NE, was 10. In January, a 6-year-old girl and a 9-year-old boy were shot in an incident on 14th Street NW. Fortunately, they survived.

The downward age spiral continues. Last Saturday, police charged an 11-year-old boy in three robberies, also in Northwest. He is believed to have had an accomplice who remains at large.

As for the 12-year-old charged in nine carjackings, robberies and assaults? At a D.C. Superior Court hearing in May, the judge ordered him held and to undergo a psychological and educational evaluation. Turns out the youth fled a youth detention shelter where he had been sent by the court after his lawyer made the case that prosecutors in the D.C. attorney general’s office failed to provide evidence in eight of the alleged crimes. A judge has ordered police to pick up the youth, now 13.

Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) has described rising violence among city youths as an “emergency.” And Robert J. Contee III, who is set to retire on Saturday as police chief, spent his two years on the job calling for more consequences for young perpetrators. He decried the so-called catch-and-release practices of prosecutors and the courts.

Which gets us to an attendant question: What happens when D.C. youths are found in violation of the law?

This question is not academic. It seems I have been writing about youth violence since time immemorial. Guns and gun violence are part and parcel of D.C. crime. At issue now, as in the past, is the effectiveness and the enforcement of our public safety laws and juvenile justice system.

D.C. Attorney General Brian L. Schwalb (D), whose office oversees juvenile justice, acknowledges public fear of violence. “Everywhere I go, people tell me they are afraid. They are concerned about their quality of life,” he said in April testimony before the D.C. Council’s Judiciary and Public Safety Committee. Schwalb repeated the oft-propounded argument of his predecessor, Karl A. Racine (D), that while the D.C. attorney general’s office holds people who break the law accountable, “we cannot return to failed policies of the past, which produced mass incarceration, destroyed Black and Brown families, punished children as adults — but that failed to make us any safer.”

Most people would agree with that. But it is both fair and important to ask the top official with purview over juvenile crime how he will hold children accountable for lawbreaking. The D.C. attorney general’s office maintains that it is “smart on crime,” and that staff facilitates services that youth offenders need to keep from reoffending. But what does that mean? Look at the growing numbers of juvenile gunshot victims and perpetrators, rising juvenile assaults and homicides. How is Schwalb’s office making D.C., and the children of D.C., safer?

I raised that question in a telephone interview with Schwalb on Thursday.

The attorney general told me it was “very concerning” that ever-younger offenders are showing up involved in serious crimes. “We are seeing many more guns on the streets, and it’s way too easy to get an illegal gun,” he said. He attributed the increase in violence to youth experiencing alienation without protective factors that could help them cope with stress and trauma. The pandemic only exacerbated unstable home environments and lax adult supervision in many of their lives, he said. “I want kids to change their behaviors,” he said. While pointing to the limitations on his “prosecutorial role,” Schwalb added that his office nonetheless looks for opportunities to work with the city’s violence-prevention and intervention programs for at-risk youth. He touted his office’s program to prevent rather than prosecute truancy, as well as his office’s “Cure the Streets” initiative, which sends outreach workers to de-escalate conflicts in troubled neighborhoods.

Schwalb’s take on youth crime is, essentially, an extension of Racine’s approach. For better or worse.

Coping with the same youth-violence problem, Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks said in a news conference this week that there is no substitute for holding juveniles who commit crimes accountable. But she added words seldom spoken by D.C. officialdom: “We have to ask the tough question ... who’s responsible for these children?”

Put that query on D.C. City Hall’s agenda, too.