BATON ROUGE — Baton Rouge police are confronting a troubling trend that law enforcement leaders say reflects deeper failures beyond policing: homicide suspects are getting younger and social media is increasingly part of the problem.
Baton Rouge Police Chief TJ Morse says the city has seen a sharp shift over the last several years, with violent crime no longer dominated by narcotics disputes or turf wars, but by conflicts sparked online and carried out by juveniles with easy access to guns.
In 2024, BRPD arrested 16 juveniles, some as young as 14, in homicide cases. That number dropped to nine juvenile homicide arrests in 2025, but Morse said the figure remains alarming.
“Nine is still a lot when you’re talking about 14- and 15-year-olds making decisions to pick up guns and kill people,” Morse said during an interview for UWK’s podcast Louisiana Unfiltered.
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From social media beef to real-world violence
According to Morse, many of these cases begin not with long-running criminal enterprises, but with arguments on social media. They are disputes over school rivalries, perceived disrespect, or online posts that escalate into violence, Morse said.
“What we’re seeing now is arguments over social media, over what school you go to, over rap music,” Morse said. “They’re shooting at people that they’re beefing with, and they’re usually beefing with people their own age.”
BRPD analysts now routinely monitor social media for signs of escalating conflicts, identifying online feuds that could turn violent and targeting individuals believed to be involved in retaliatory shootings.
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Stolen guns, unlocked cars and system failures
Morse said many of the firearms used by juveniles are stolen from unlocked vehicles, a trend police say continues to fuel youth gun violence.
“It very easily has turned into guns,” Morse said. “Guns that, you know, are usually stolen out of unlocked vehicles that then wind up in the hands of some juveniles.”
Police leaders stress that enforcement alone cannot solve the problem. Morse said multiple systems must fail before a teenager decides to pull a trigger, including schools, families, community institutions, and social support networks.
“We can clean it up on the back end and arrest them,” he said. “But there’s a lot of systems in place on the front end that we also need to rely on — school, churches, community organizations, families. Whatever it is to give these kids other outlets, other resources, where they’re not want to do those kind of crimes.”
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Youth crime by the numbers
The trend unfolding in Baton Rouge reflects a much broader and deeply troubling national pattern: guns have become the leading cause of death for children and teenagers in the United States.
According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, firearms surpassed motor vehicle crashes as the top cause of death for children and adolescents in 2020. It’s a distinction that has remained in place every year since.
Nationally, the CDC reports that more than 4,000 children and teens die from gun-related injuries each year, with homicide accounting for the majority of those deaths. Youth gun deaths increased sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic and have remained historically high, even as overall crime rates fluctuate.
Public health researchers with the Kaiser Family Foundation uncovered that firearm deaths among children rose more than 50 percent between 2019 and 2022, a surge driven largely by homicides involving handguns.
Louisiana mirrors and in some cases exceeds those national trends.
Data compiled by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions shows that in 2023, firearms were the leading cause of death for Louisiana children ages 1 to 17, surpassing car crashes, cancer, and accidental injuries. It was the leading cause of death among young people ages 1-17 in 2023, the Center found.
“I think conflict resolution is definitely a skill that we’re missing, especially in the younger people… And so it very easily has turned into guns,” Morse added.
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