POLICE AND THE COMMUNITY

Introduction

You have now been exposed to the basic structure of the juvenile justice system. Essentially the system is thought of as the police, probation officers, juvenile judges, the juvenile court, and juvenile corrections. This week will focus specifically on how police are involved in the juvenile justice system. The role of policing in working with juveniles varies in many ways, and those distinctions are important to your understanding of the juvenile justice system.

This Week in Relation to the Course

This week you are introduced to the wide variety of non-system alternatives. That is, those programs that are not part of the governmental agency system, but that manage to touch the lives of most young people and their families who find themselves at the edge of the formal system. These programs are generally referred to as prevention or intervention efforts. Certainly, it is cheaper to keep a crime from occurring in the first place and almost as cheap to ensure that a youth does not let non-law-abiding behavior become a pattern. The difficulty with many of these programs is proving that they work. It is sometimes even more difficult to prove to legislators that state dollars need to be spent at the front end of the system to avoid spending money on the most expensive alternative: incarceration.

Interestingly, the most seemingly rigid component of the system is in many instances the most flexible and informal: the police. Police have tremendous discretion and quantitatively have the most personal contact with young people engaging in at-risk behaviors. The police most often make the decision to have a strong talk with a juvenile or to refer the youth to a juvenile court.

Discussion of a Key Point, Thread, or Objective

• Prevention
• Accountability
• best practices
• CHINS
• community policing
• restorative policing
• sealing records
• divestiture

Practical Applications and Questions

1. In what ways have you observed or experienced the use or abuse of police discretion?

2. How can expanding the rights of youth often cause the system to become tougher?

How Tools, Readings, and Simulations Help Solidify Concepts

While police discretion most often positively impacts the future of youths, it can also be negative given the particular officer's predisposition to the type of youth or type of behavior being dealt with. Status offenders are a case in point. Technically, status offenders are nondelinquent youths: runaways, truants, or those possessing or consuming alcohol. Efforts are nearly always made to keep these young people out of the official system of detention and correctional incarceration.

If however, the youth is not responding to nonsecure placement, then the police have the discretion to elevate the behavior into a delinquent class, such as trespassing, shoplifting, or vandalism. Then, the status offender may be placed in secure confinement and may, depending on the family situation, spend more time in confinement than a hardened delinquent might.

You should also keep in mind that it is not only the broad discretionary powers of the police, but the parens patriae doctrine of the juvenile court that while, normally benefiting the youth, can also jeopardize the protections under due process.

Summary

There are numerous programs available to youth short of formal processing through the juvenile justice system. Programs, some of them operating nationally, have helped countless youths from proceeding further into the system. These community-based alternatives also often save a youth from being stigmatized by the delinquent label. Police have become a partner to many of these organizations and to schools, and police see the value, both economically and in cost to human life, of keeping as many nonviolent youths as they can out of the formal system.