Chase of stolen car and teens’ arrest in Irondequoit caught on camera

ROCHESTER, N.Y. – News10NBC was on scene when two teenagers got caught after a chase in a stolen car. The car was stolen out of Irondequoit. The chase ended Monday night behind a Rochester city school.

If the system works, at least one of the teens should have been in court Tuesday, and now supervised by the county probation department almost every day.

Our camera was recording when Rochester and Irondequoit police found the teenagers in the stolen car.
At least one of the kids they found was a girl. The other was a teenage boy.

Since the beginning of the year, Rochester Police have arrested 114 teenagers for stolen cars.

The chief of police in Irondequoit said one of the teenagers was sent to the detention center. The other one got an appearance ticket. But if the system works the way it’s supposed to, the one who got the appearance ticket should be contacted by a probation officer from Monroe County Monday night, the start of what the county describes as intense supervision.

Richard Tantalo, Monroe County Director of Public Safety: “One of the most concerning aspects to this rise in crime is that it’s most often being committed by teens and juveniles.”

Richard Tantalo is a former Irondequoit Police chief and he is now the county’s director of public safety. His team came up with the program that connects a probation officer to a teenager arrested for a stolen car, and gets them a social worker, counselor, enrolled in school or a job.

Tantalo: “Over the last six weeks, we’ve had 59 youths enter into the program, and just three have reoffended.”

Tantalo called those number encouraging.

The intervention by probation was necessary under the current criminal justice rules in New York.

Tantalo: “The state criminal justice reforms were designed to protect a segment of juvenile and youth offenders from having to go to jail, but what it didn’t do is give us an alternative to hold dangerous teens accountable.”

The probation strategy tries to reduce the number of stolen cars, and the number of teenagers who do it more than once.

That happens across the county.

The Irondequoit Police blotter shows they arrested a 17-year-old in a stolen car on July 5, and he was the same 17-year-old arrested in a stolen car on June 30.