WICHITA, Kan. (KAKE) - A 14-year-old arrested for first degree murder, five teens arrested for murder in a double homicide, and two adults and a teen arrested in the shooting death of a one-year-old. Those are just a few of the recent headlines involving teenagers and violent crime in Wichita.  

Violent criminals in Wichita are getting younger. That's what law enforcement, crime prevention and mentorship organizations told Senator Roger Marshall at a roundtable on crime Monday morning.

"We can't arrest ourselves out of this issue," Sedgwick County Sheriff Jeff Easter said, more than once. "We've been trying to do that for years and it doesn't work."

Everyone gathered agreed that the solution is building relationships throughout our community.

"They don't have hope," said Ricardo Harris, who runs Wichita GEAR Up, a federally funded program at Wichita State to help introduce under-privileged youth to the possibilities of a college education. "So, some kind of way...we've got to show hope for the community again."

"The fact is we have to be in the middle school now," said Wichita Police Chief Joe Sullivan about his crime prevention officers. "We have to get to these kids much younger, and we have to provide them with the support. Because the next thing that happens is what they don't have at home, they turn to the gang culture for and they find love and purpose there."

Sullivan said the gang mentality then infects every aspect of the kids' behavior, from defiance of authority, to drugs and domestic violence.

Job training and mentorship groups like Big Brothers, Big Sisters and Wichita GEAR Up are making a difference, but they say they need your help to reach the large number of kids in need. Big Brothers, Big Sisters said, at any given time, they have two to three hundred kids waiting just to get onto the waitlist for a Big. 

Which is why they say they need your help, in finding more mentors and in funding more programs. But, you've got to really want to help to be effective.

"We got to be real," Harris said. "We've got to really show our hearts to the point where we really...more than care. It's more than just checking a box and saying, 'We've done it.' But we really care about this young person, we care about this family, we care about this community."

Social media didn't come up until Marshall, who's a supporter of banning TikTok because of its effect on youth, asked about it. But, once he brought it up, Sheriff Easter, Chief Sullivan and his officers had plenty to say as well.

They talked about how gangs and human traffickers are using social media to recruit younger and younger teens, with kids as young as 12 and 14 getting arrested for gang-related violence in the metro area.

The sheriff said more than once it's now easier to buy drugs online than to order a pizza.

"Almost all the drug trafficking or the drug sales is taking place over social media. And so that's a real problem," Easter said. "The feuds that take place, we now have no idea about because it's all over social media. We just get to respond to the outcome of that."

Marshall suggested one solution might be a law requiring parental consent for anyone under the age of 16 to have a social media account. Crime prevention and youth mentorship leaders at the roundtable all suggested more parental and guardian monitoring of online activities would help a lot.

Marshall said what he heard was overwhelming.

"The change in attitude over the last decade is to help people to not commit crimes in the future, trying to reach kids when they're younger. Just overwhelmed," he said. "This roundtable was especially meaningful for me. It was very encouraging to me to know that this community is trying to solve the problems themselves...and (not) point the finger at Washington, D.C. and say, 'come solve our problems.'"