Nina Rose Fischer - The Case for Youth Police Initiative

This book investigates the Youth Police Initiative (YPI) intervention with a comprehensive look at its effects in Boston as well as Brownsville, Brooklyn, a neighborhood that has both rich community networks and the highest crime rate in New York City. Based on a phenomenological approach, The Case for Youth Police Initiative: Interdependent Fates and the Power of Peace offers first-person narratives of youth, police, and community members in Brownsville as the YPI program was implemented.

Police shootings and other negative exchanges between community members and the police have brought heightened awareness to the volatile relations between communities and police. The North American Family Institute began the YPI in Baltimore in 2003 with the ambition of keeping vulnerable youth away from arrests, gangs, guns, violence, and fatalities. The training intervention has been replicated in several communities in the United States and beyond. The focus of YPI training is to address the dual challenge of teaching youth the skills to resolve daily conflicts with authority while also teaching police officers to have meaningful dialogue with young people. The voices of the stakeholders reveal changes in attitudes and actions from before, during, and after YPIs implementation. A comprehensive illustration of the interventions arc provides the reader with an in-depth, textured perspective of what it takes to prevent pernicious eruptions of tension between police and the community they are charged to serve and protect. YPIs success in addressing tensions between youth and police in Boston and Brownsville, Brooklyn, maps out a blueprint for progress in other communities.

Suitable for scholars and researchers in criminology, sociology, psychology, and social work and practitioners on the front lines, The Case for Youth Police Initiative will provoke dialogue on best practices for changing the volatile climate between police and the young people.

Nina Rose Fischer, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the Interdisciplinary Studies Department. She has taught undergraduates and graduate students at Hunter College, CUNY in Sociology, Hunter School of Social Work, and John Jay College. She has 20 years experience in juvenile justice as a clinician, administrator, researcher, and policy analyst. She conducted a meta-analysis for the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services of juvenile justice re-entry and led implementation research in the jurisdictions with the highest numbers of incarcerated youth. She is Principal Investigator on two mixed methods studies. First, the Youth Police Initiative evaluation in Long Islands Hempstead and Wyandanch; Brownsville Brooklyn, New York; and Kansas City, Missouri. Second, the evaluation of the Safety First Real Drug Education for Teens harm-reduction drug-education curriculum in New York City and San Francisco, CA. She won the Andrew Weil Award for Achievement in the Field of Drug Education for that research with 800 freshmen. She authored book chapters on cross-systems work with youth involved in multiple systems and innovative interventions with youth in the juvenile justice system. She has also had an article about Youth Police Initiative pilot studies published in the Journal of Peace Psychology.

This series explores innovations in the field of policing and offers the latest insight into the field through research, theoretical applications, case studies, and evaluations. Famous innovations developed over the course of the late twentieth century and into the turn of the twenty-first include approaches such as community policing, broken windows policing, problem-oriented policing, pulling levers policing, third-party policing, hot spots policing, CompStat, and evidence-based policing. Some of these approaches have been successful, and some have not, while new innovations continue to arise. Improving police performance through innovation is often not straightforward. Police departments are highly resistant to change, but through such research we expect to find further refinement of our knowledge of what works in policing, under what circumstances particular strategies may work, and why these strategies are effective in improving police performance.

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Innovations-in-Policing/book-series/RIP

Interdependent Fates and the Power of Peace

Nina Rose Fischer

First published 2020

by Routledge

52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2020 Taylor & Francis

The right of Nina Rose Fischer to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fischer, Nina Rose, author.

Title: The case for Youth Police Initiative: interdependent fates & the power of peace/Nina Rose Fischer.

Description: New York, NY: Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020007912 (print) | LCCN 2020007913 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815384748 (hardback) | ISBN 9781351203517 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Youth and Police Initiative. | Police services for juvenilesMassachusettsBostonCase studies. | Police services for juvenilesNew York (State)New YorkCase studies. | Police-community relationsMassachusettsBostonCase studies. | Police-community relationsNew York (State)New YorkCase studies. | Brownsville (New York, N.Y.)

Classification: LCC HV8079.25 .F54 2020 (print) | LCC HV8079.25 (ebook) | DDC 363.2/3dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007912

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007913

ISBN: 978-0-8153-8474-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-351-20351-7 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo

by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

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