Study: Police academies spend no more than 1% of their training hours on juvenile justice issues
A survey by a Cambridge-based organization that trains police to deal with juveniles, little of that training is reaching those at the front lines of confrontations with wayward youth: police officers.
Police academies in 37 states, including Massachusetts, spend no more than 1 percent of their training hours on juvenile justice issues, the survey conducted by Strategies for Youth found.
Only two states in the country make training on youth development and communication with teenagers a priority in the written curriculum.
And most academies do not teach recruits how to recognize and interact with juveniles who have been traumatized or have mental health disorders.
Arrest numbers of juveniles underscore how critical that training is, according to the survey "If Not Now, When? A Survey of Juvenile Justice Training in America’s Police Academies". Every year officers arrest about 2.1 million people under 18, mostly for minor offenses such as disorderly conduct and trespassing. Only 12 percent of juvenile arrests are for serious offenses, a statistic that suggests that police are too quick to arrest teenagers and children.
There are no official Massachusetts numbers for juvenile arrests. Youths 16 and under are considered juveniles in the Bay State court system.
“All the data show that arrests can really, utterly alter a kid’s life,” said Lisa H. Thurau, executive director of Strategies for Youth, which surveyed 50 states on their academy training curriculum between fall 2011 and fall 2012. “We really need to think about how we effectively interact with kids in addition to arrests and alternatives. That’s what the entire juvenile justice world is saying and police need to know it, too.”
Most states are cutting police training, including Massachusetts, where funding has gone from $3.7 million in fiscal 1999 to $2.52 million in fiscal 2012.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2013/02/13/survey-shows-police-have-little-training-when-comes-juveniles/n2n4qCg6tI35bh3znyTRvL/story.html