Youth and police: Making peace
Nina Rose Fischer
City University of New York, USA
: Int J Ment Health Psychiatry
Abstract
The Youth Police Initiative is an innovative approach to mending the fractured relations between police and community members that have the most police contact. Anecdotal and preliminary data analysis from author’s evaluation showed significant change in knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs between young people and police officers. This workshop is experiential: learning through parallel process so participants can understand and implement an exciting conflict resolution model. The author will begin with a discussion about the participants’ observations of police community and young people relations from their locales. Where are the majority of police present in your locales? How would you describe relationships between community members and police there? Who have the most police contact and why? How do you think the police perceive the young people? How do you think the young people perceive the police? Why? What is the most common interaction that young people have with police? She will record these responses on a white board or butcher paper. She will then show a video about an anecdotal experience of Youth Police Initiative from a public housing development called Franklin Field in Boston, Massachusetts. She will ask participants: “What did you see?” “Was this effective?” “Why?” “How would this work where you are from?” Participants will then choose one of the common police/youth scenarios from their initial brainstorm and do a role-play of the scenario. One group will play the police and one the youth. She will ask what it was like being in their roles. Participants will then discuss what could have been done to change the outcome. The roles will be reversed and we will apply one of the suggested outcomes. We will have a wrap up about questions, concerns and implementation steps Recent Publications 1. Fischer N R (2011) Model approaches for children and youth with serious emotional disturbance: systems of care and wraparound. In S A Estrine, R T Hettenbach, H Arthur and M Messina (Eds.) New Directions in Behavioral Health: Service Delivery Strategies for Vulnerable Populations (87-104). New York, NY: Springer Publishing. 2. Arthur H, Bowler S and Fischer N R (2011) Children Youth and Families. In S A Estrine, R T Hettenbach, H Arthur & M. Messina (Eds.), New Directions in Behavioral Health: Service Delivery Strategies for Vulnerable Populations, (pp. 71-85). New York, NY: Springer Publishing.
Biography
Nina Rose Fischer has a PhD in Social Welfare Policy, and is an Assistant Professor at John Jay College in Interdisciplinary Studies. Her expertise is in youth justice and mixed methods evaluation. She evaluated a reentry intervention for young women and a harm reduction curriculum in a New York City high school. She conducted a study of the Youth Police Initiative in Long Island NY, Brooklyn NY at a precinct with a significant violent crime and police citizen complaint rate, and in Kansas City Missouri in a precinct where there have been 157 homicides in the last year. She currently has a book contract to write an ethnography that will provide rich description of an intervention that may actually bridge the divide between police and communities. nfischer@jjay.cuny.edu
