The following description is from Connecticut KidsNet. It explains more about the CDCP that Dr. Marans spoke about in his presentation to the Public Forum

 

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CHILD DEVELOPMENT - COMMUNITY POLICING PROGRAM

YALE UNIVERSITY CHILD STUDY CENTER NEW HAVEN DEPARTMENT OF POLICE SERVICE

Steven Marans, Ph.D.
Coordinator, Child Development - Community Policing Program
Yale Child Study Center
47 College Street, Suite 218
New Haven, CT 06510
(203) 785-7047

 

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION

Introduction

For too many children in America, the direct experience of acute violence is superimposed on chronic exposure to violence in their homes and communities. For example, a recent study conducted at Boston City Hospital reported that 1 out of every 10 children seen in their primary care clinic witnessed a shooting or stabbing before age 6; half in the home, half on the streets (Taylor, 1992). In a survey of inner-city elementary school children in New Orleans, 80% of the sample reported witnessing violence; 60% had seen weapons used; 40% had seen a dead body (Osofsky, 1992). Similarly, in a study conducted in New Haven schools of 6th, 8th and 10th graders, 40% reported being witness to at least one violent crime in the past year (New Haven Public Schools, 1992). These psychological victims of community violence far outnumber the medical casualties.

Child Witnesses of Violence

While specific incidents of violence may lead to a range of emotional reactions, including the circumscribed symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD] -- disrupted patterns of eating, sleeping, attention and relating, fearfulness, flashbacks, and the like (American Psychiatric Association, 1987); repeated exposures may also lead towards a variety of persistent patterns of psychological maladaptation. The child who is chronically exposed as a witness, bystander, or victim may withdraw, turn inward and appear depressed; he or she may display difficulties with attention, school achievement and social engagement. It is just as likely that he or she might assume the role of the oppositional, aggressive perpetrator, organizing a sense of self around the active involvement in just that type of experience which initially was so threatening.

Feeling unsafe, helpless and small runs counter to the developing child's wish for and capacity to be in greater control of him or herself and to achieve increasing mastery of the environment. By turning passive into active, the child attempts to regain the experience of power and control when the dangers of real violence provoke feelings of helplessness and fear. Rather than feeling the anxiety and humiliation of being the victim or feeling vulnerable to the aggression of others, the child may become the active perpetrator instead. Oppositional behavior at home or at school may be a transient response to the loss of control represented by exposure to an isolated incident of violence. However, when the child is exposed to the dangers of violence on a regular basis, identification with the exciting and powerful role of perpetrator may become a chronic adaptation to feeling helpless and afraid. Thus, victims turn into victimizers and children perpetuate this cycle of violence that plagues their families and communities.

Police Responses

At their best, police can provide children and families a sense of security and safety through rapid, authoritative and effective responses at times of danger. All too often, however, children's contacts with police officers arouse more negative feelings. In the psychological lives of inner city children, the appearance of police officers in the context of aggression makes them the objects of children's and families' rage. Their arrival "after the fact" strengthens children's view of society as unprotective. The role of the police as symbols of the dominant culture may shape children's views of them as representatives of an alien, uncaring outside world. When police officers are in fact thoughtless or inconsiderate to a child in the course of their response to a crisis, they reinforce the child's experience of society as uncaring, and strengthen the child's belief that hostile behavior is the normative mode of adult functioning.

The concept of community-based policing provides a framework for officers to behave in ways that minimize these negative experiences and instead offer children positive models for identification. In contrast to an older model of policing, which emphasized more anonymous patrols and 911-driven responses to crisis, community policing capitalizes on permanent assignments and greater accessibility of police within neighborhoods. In this model, police engage in activities strengthening those social structures which deter crime and facilitate neighborhood functioning; in early detection of high risk situations likely to lead to criminal activity; and in the interruption of patterns of criminality at their roots. For community-based policing, the pursuit of criminals is seen within this broader context of prevention and early intervention in high risk situations.

When it functions optimally, community-based policing integrates police officers within their communities; they are known as individuals, rather than only by role, and they know the people they serve as individuals. Community policing brings officers into regular, ongoing contact with children and families within a given neighborhood. This contact counteracts the perception of 'too little too late' of traditional policing. This new approach, however, requires a new type of police officer with special training.

Collaborative Response to Urban Violence

New Haven's transition to community-based policing is unique to the region - and in many ways to the nation - because it is citywide and it is integrated into all aspects of the police department's work. The department recognizes the need for new comprehensive training methods for its recruits and experienced officers, as well as the need for shared learning with other social agencies serving the same community. It also recognizes that the greater burden placed on police officers is accompanied by greater frustration, often the result of an inability to solve or interpret complex social problems, and it seeks to educate its officers through immersion not only with service experts but with the communities themselves.

The Child Development-Community Policing Program (CD-CP) emerged out of the shared concerns of Child Study Center faculty and New Haven police leadership regarding the potential psychological casualties of community violence. The Program is a model for systematic change in the relationship between law enforcement and mental health professionals. As with other models for social change within institutions, such as schools, the Program is based on the full engagement and philosophical agreement in goals and methods of the leadership within the New Haven police and the faculty of the Child Study Center. The elements and priorities of the Program have been conceived and developed jointly by supervisory officers and clinical faculty, including the format and curriculum for training, procedures and criteria for clinical consultation and the design of an ongoing interdisciplinary team to oversee program development. Both the police and the clinicians involved in the program have committed themselves to a collaborative process and an expansion of their various roles in an effort to address the needs of children and families that neither the law enforcement nor the mental health system has been able to meet alone.

The various components of the Program have been designed with the overarching goal of generating and maintaining productive relationships among neighborhood police officers and the children and families who live in their neighborhood. The Program also aims to promote relationships between community-based officers and consulting clinicians, which will facilitate the officers' conscious assumption of expanded, psychologically positive roles within their assigned neighborhoods. The individual elements of the Program combine to create an interdisciplinary system of training and support for a new kind of police force.

Program Outline

The Child Development-Community Policing Program consists of several inter-related educational and clinical components which aim at sharing knowledge and reordering the relationship between police officers and mental health clinicians.

1.Clinical Fellowships for Senior Officers

Community-based policing requires supervisors who direct neighborhood police teams to be committed to the philosophy of neighborhood policing and prepared to translate the concepts into actual practice. The Fellowship Program aims at helping to provide supervisory officers with the special psychological expertise they need to lead a cohesive team of community-based officers in a wide variety of crime prevention, early intervention and relationship building activities involving children, families and community agencies within their individual neighborhoods. Child Development Fellows spend three to four hours a week over the course of three to four months in the Child Study Center. Fellows participate in a range of activities which familiarize them with developmental concepts, patterns of psychological disturbance, methods of clinical intervention, and settings for treatment and care. Through the Fellowship, ongoing collaborative relationships are established among the police Fellows and the mental health professionals involved in the Program.

2.Police Fellowships for Clinical Faculty

Basic familiarity with the concerns and practices of police officers is essential for mental health professionals who intend to develop trusting collegial relationships with officers and to explore collaborative intervention strategies. Through the Fellowship Program, clinicians spend time with police colleagues, in squad cars, in police stations and in the streets, observing officers' day to day activities. These experiences allow mental health professionals to familiarize themselves with police operations, local neighborhoods and the realities of officers' interactions with children and families. The Fellowship also provides opportunities for clinicians and officers to spend time together discussing their varied perspectives and approaches to serving youth and families, and to explore ideas for new modes of collaboration.

3.Seminar for Police Officers

A seminar for rank and file officers, jointly developed by police supervisors and Child Study Center faculty, aims at providing police officers with both knowledge and a sense of personal empowerment to think about and intervene positively with children and families. The seminar meets weekly for ten weeks, and is co-led by a supervisory officer and a clinician. Exposure to child development principles, in the context of case examples drawn from the experience of seminar members and leaders, introduces police officers to the importance of thinking about children's development and their own influence on children while they are encountering children and families in their daily work. The course also provides officers with the experience of working alongside mental health professionals and with concepts and methods for working cooperatively with other social services on behalf of children.

4.Consultation Service

As community-based police officers become more active and visible within their neighborhoods, they come in more frequent contact with children and families who are in danger or distress, e.g., victims or witnesses of violence, truants from school, or teens involved with gang activity. In their expanded roles, these neighborhood officers require available clinical support. The Program has established a Consultation Service, staffed 24 hours a day by a team of clinicians and specially trained police supervisors, who respond to officers' immediate needs for guidance in crisis interventions and mental health related questions, especially following children's traumatic experiences. In urgent cases referred to the Consultation Service, a clinician may meet immediately with a child in acute distress, either at the police station or at the family's home. At other times, the consultation leads to later meeting with a clinician or to a supportive intervention by the neighborhood officer who is known to the child, guided by the consulting clinician or sergeant. Referrals to other available clinical programs are also arranged by the Consultation Service.

5.Program Conference

Police officers and clinical faculty meet weekly to discuss difficult and perplexing cases that arise from the officers' direct experience in their neighborhoods and from the Consultation Service. The case discussions provide a forum for police and mental health professionals to examine cases from a variety of perspectives in order to understand better the experience of children and families exposed to violence, to explore the limits of current intervention strategies, and to develop improved methods of collaboration and response. The Conference also provides a regular forum for examining systemic, institutional and administrative issues.

Results of the Program's First Three Years

During the first three years of operation, all 400 members of the police force have been trained in the use of the CD-CP Consultation Service. The Program has provided training to more than 200 officers through the basic child development seminars. Twenty-two supervisory sergeants and lieutenants representing most geographic areas of the city, and the Assistant Chief of Police have completed the Fellowship Program. These leaders within the police department remain permanent members of the Program Conference and are actively engaged in further development of the Program and dissemination of the Program's philosophy among their supervisees and fellow officers. Seven of these supervisors have joined with clinical faculty of the Center to staff the Consultation Service.

The Consultation Service has responded to over 300 calls involving over 500 children. These calls have concerned children of all ages who have been involved in violent incidents as victims, witnesses or perpetrators, within their homes or in the larger community. Children have been seen individually and in groups, in their homes, in police stations, in the Child Study Center and in community centers. Clinical contact has been from within minutes of a violent event to several days after.

It is significant to note that in each of the cases referred to the Consultation Service, officers commented that, in the past, their role would have ended with filing an incident report on the crime or complaint. Officers described countless cases in which children may have been on the scene of violence and were never noticed by police personnel who were only engaged in interviewing adult witnesses, collecting evidence or coordinating arrangements with emergency services.

In its first three years the CD-CP program has expanded the ways in which both officers and mental health professionals think about their work, and has led to broader collaborative efforts to meet the needs of vulnerable children, which include other community institutions such as juvenile probation and child welfare. The New Haven program has also become a model for similar interdisciplinary programs in other communities under the auspices of the U.S. Justice Department, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), and the Local Crime Prevention Block Grant Program of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994.

Summary

The Child Development-Community Policing Program is an innovative project that has brought together New Haven police officers and mental health professionals for the first time in a joint effort to address the psychological burdens on children and families imposed by their chronic exposure to urban violence. The Program provides community-based officers with the clinical knowledge and support they need to assume expanded psychological roles in the lives of the children and families they serve, and provides clinicians with opportunities to affect the lives of children who previously would not have come to the attention of mental health services. Working together, both officers and clinicians are broadening their perspectives on the children and families they serve and are developing new strategies for the consulting room, the classroom and the streets for interrupting and minimizing the psychological effects of community violence.

References

American Psychiatric Association. (1987). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (3rd ed. revised). Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press.

New Haven Public Schools (1992). Report on the SAHA. Social Project Evaluation 1991-92: Final Report, pp. 179-196.

Osofsky, J., Wewer, S., Hann, D., & Fick, A. (1992). Can they feel safe again? The impact of community violence on infants, toddlers, their parents and practitioners. Zero to Three. Arlington, VA: National Center for Clinical Infant Programs.

Taylor, L., Zukerman, B., Harik, V., & Groves, B. (1992). Exposure to violence among inner-city parents and young children. AJDC. 146: 487-494.