The number of juvenile arrests with guns in the Big Apple has increased by 137% since 2018 and has increased for six consecutive years; This, too, is disturbing data, as The Post shows.

So far this year, 427 children aged 17 and under have been caught with a gun; Over the same time period in 2023, the figure was 397, an increase of 7%.

But this is a dramatic increase from before the pandemic in 2018, when 180 youths were caught with firearms.

“I read all the reports that are coming in at the precinct level and I see that there are a lot of kids involved, whether they are victims or perpetrators,” said Detective Frank Gagnon of the NYPD Cooperative Policing Unit. “The kids there, the kids at the scene, the kids around. “This is very bad.”

The shocking statistics come as teenagers have been hit by recent shootings, including four teenagers who died in separate shootings on four consecutive days last month.

“This is a really bad sign,” said Chauncey Parker, the city’s new Deputy Mayor for Public Safety.

Including murder victims Clarence Jones, 16, Person shot in Harlem on October 24; Malachi Deberry, 15, was shot in the head next day at Brownsville; Taearion Mungo, 16, who was shot in the chest in Fort Greene on Oct. 26, and Tristan Sanders, 15, who was killed in Crown Heights on Oct. 27.

Police said they did their best to keep children away from guns, but were hampered by the state’s “Raising the Age” law, which requires minors caught with firearms to appear in Family Court.

Before the law changed, 16- and 17-year-olds were arraigned in criminal court and many were jailed on Rikers Island.

“There are at least two cases that I know of where kids were arrested with four or five guns,” said recently retired NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Youth Services Kevin O’Connor. “They were just released, released, released.”

Judges in family court were not even told how many gun collars a teenager had before, he said.

“Raise the Age broke the system,” O’Connor said.

The city relies on programs that engage young people in their spare time, such as Saturday Night Lights, which offers structured sports programs to get teens off the streets on the weekends, and the NYPD’s Youth Community Officers, who try to catch troubled kids in advance. They were arrested.

Gagnon now helps oversee the program and explained that officers proactively work with kids before they get into hot water.

“This could include school safety officers… it could also involve our school administrative staff to get a better idea of ​​what they are like in different environments or who they are hanging out with,” he said.

Gagnon and other officers were also standing outside schools during the firing to see if teens were hanging out with gang members.

“No child would undertake to go out and find an illegal gun,” he said. “Our goal was to understand where this influence was coming from and see if we could move them away from it and offer them a different path.”

A teenager who hung out with gang members posted photos of himself holding a firearm on social media and told Gagnon he didn’t know it was illegal to own a gun.

Gagnon said the teen asked him: “‘Is it illegal to post this online?’ he said. “And I said, ‘It’s illegal to own this.’ Posting this online is a terrible idea.”

Gagnon said the teen’s condition improved after police involved his mother in the case.

“The juvenile was never arrested for any reason,” Gagnon said. “It was huge for us that he wasn’t arrested and that he was no longer associated with kids responsible for a significant amount of gun violence.”

Police were less successful in another case of a child arrested with an armed friend. The boy’s parents were uncooperative, and the teenager eventually brought a gun to school and was arrested.

“That’s the hard part of our job as young officers,” he said.