Paul Bass Photo
When Gainesville Chief of Police Tony Jones returns to Florida from New Haven, he plans to consider pairing police officers with social workers to help children cope with violence — a tactic New Haven police, in partnership with the Yale Child Study Center, have employed since 1991.
Jones (pictured) was among 30 police chiefs who have spent a couple of days in town at a conference on juvenile justice and child protection, held by the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP). New Haven Chief Dean Esserman, who chairs an IACP committee on the subject, hosted the conference. The goal, according to organizers: To change the way police departments deal with young people.
The chiefs, uniformed and business-casual, gathered in the luxurious President’s Room above Woolsey Hall at Yale for the intensive three-day course, including presentations on child psychology, fair sentencing, breaking racial disparities, collaborating with schools and de-escalation tactics.
Cambridge Police Commissioner Robert Haas said past IACP juvenile justice reform events inspired his department to implement a program that connects youth of all backgrounds to current officers, helping them recruit “a force that represents the community.” At the New Haven conference this week, he said, he picked up an idea from Philadelphia that he hopes to bring to his city: Pairing rookie cops with high-risk teens for a five-day conference (for which the kids get paid $20 per day).
A former state official responsible for alternative-incarceration programs, Bill Carbone (pictured), who now runs the University of New Haven’s Tow Youth Justice Institute, advised police chiefs to take every measure possible to reduce the number and severity of children’s encounters with the criminal justice system.
He said that he has come across departments that frequently arrest and charge juveniles for petty offenses like refusing to remove hats, minor fights, or possession of loose cigarettes. For minority youth, police encounters disproportionately end in the backseat of a cruiser.
“We have to avoid the event of making arrests and putting kids through the system — it’s counterproductive,” Carbone said. “If you label kids as delinquents, they’ll live up to it.”
Police, school administrators and probation officers should be given the discretion to counsel children and mediate conflicts, rather than jumping straight to punitive measures, he said.
Jeremy Krzys, the police chief of New Cumberland, West Virginia, said that he’s excited to bring the progressive policing techniques from police chiefs across the country back home to his town of 1,000 and “make some change.”
“We’re trained one way, just to make arrests and enforce laws by the book,” he said. “But this class has been really eye-opening. We have to interact more with juveniles in the city, to actually talk to them.”
Krzys was among 30 IACP members who were admitted to the Institute out of the 130 who applied, according to Aviva Kurash, IACP’s senior program manager. She said she hopes the program will influence departments across the country to make juvenile justice reform a priority, and give them the tools to boost their initiatives.
Wednesday’s full day of programming began at 8 a.m. with opening remarks from Mayor Toni Harp and continued until after 5 pm. The Institute is sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation.