Your child may not have a favorable impression of law enforcement; for that matter, you may not, either. How does the law enforcement community view kids and crime, what can you expect, and how should you interact with law enforcement officers if they tell you your child has been involved with criminal activity?

Do You Know the Law?

One of the first questions law enforcement officers ask parents is, “Do you know the law?” Of course no one can memorize every city code and regulation, but it is important to have a decent grasp of the laws that might affect your child. For example, what time is curfew in your city? What are the laws about loitering, littering, and vandalism? What is the minimum age for drinking and buying cigarettes, and what is the punishment for using a fake ID to get around age limits? What are the traffic laws, and is your child old enough to drive a car, with or without his friends? If you see your child or his friends involved with an activity you think is questionable, pull your child aside and learn about the rules together. Be sure to include the punishment in your research, as it may be much worse than being in time out or having screen time taken away.

A Knock on Your Door

Having a police officer bring your child home may be in the top ten of a parent's worst nightmares. However, according to Dr. Tod Burke, a former police officer who's now a tenured professor of criminology at Radford University in Radford, Virginia, if a police officer brings your child home or talks to you without arresting your child, it's an informal procedure which probably means he's cutting your child some slack. If a child is polite and cooperative with the officer instead of mouthing off, and if the officer hasn't already made an allowance for the child on other occasions, this is a likely scenario that allows your family to address the situation and move forward.

In order to get the best results in this situation, Dr. Burke recommends you thank the officer and ask him to give you as much detail as possible. Don't jump all over the officer or defend your child, just listen. Conversely, it won't help to side with the police officer and jump all over your child. Your goal in this interaction should be to get as much information as possible so that you have a clear and realistic picture of what happened. Keep your child present during this conversation, and ask your child in front of the officer if what the officer has said is true.

Making Positive Connections

Another goal of law enforcement is to make positive connections with kids before they need to enforce the law. Sound familiar? That's because it's similar to parent-child bonding activities that help decrease the likelihood of defiant behavior. It's always more beneficial to correct behavior through a positive existing relationship than by cracking down on someone you hardly know.

Law enforcement organizations across the country have established youth outreach programs to make positive connections with kids and create a favorable impression of law enforcement before kids become involved with crime. Lt. Gil Owens of the South Carolina Highway Patrol recently founded a program called Touching Another Generation (TAG). He and his seventy troopers each must make contact with at least four teens per month at a time when the teens are not in trouble, and in a nonintrusive way, so they reach more than 3,000 teens per year (note that this is an action-oriented plan that has measurable results within a timeline). When the troopers encounter teens in a casual interaction, they ask them if they wear their seatbelts, educate them about recent traffic fatality causes and statistics in their state, and ask if they can come speak to the teens' class, football team, or other organization. Lt. Owens says the goal of the program is to show teens that law enforcement isn't after them, and it has been effective at breaking barriers and getting local kids to be more responsive to law enforcement.

Crime and the Future

The justice system is softer on kids than on adults, believing — as most everyone does — that kids are more malleable than adults and will respond better to rehabilitation than adults. Lighter sentencing is not intended as a “get out of jail free card,” but as an opportunity for correcting criminal behavior so that the child does not grow up to commit more crimes. That's what happens if juvenile crime goes undeterred — the child will continue breaking the law, and as an adult, will face stiffer penalties and a life with fewer opportunities for fulfillment, pleasure, and success. If you want your child to have a fulfilling adulthood, take action now.