Police contact with young people: communication, discretion and school settings

At 4:43 p.m. on Thursday, May 14, 2026, a 911 call came from a woman walking her dog past Eastgate Park. A boy was sitting on the edge of the basketball court holding his elbow, and two older boys had just run off toward the Lindell Avenue towers. Ferreira and Officer Dev Malhotra arrived four minutes later. Ben Arsenault, fifteen, was shaking. His elbow was scraped and bleeding, and he kept saying, 'My mom's going to kill me, it's a new phone.' This lesson uses the first hour of that call to look at how officers communicate with young people, how they use discretion, and how contacts in schools differ from contacts on the street.

Talking with young people

Young people, whether victims, witnesses or suspects, are not simply adults with less experience. Several features of adolescent thinking affect how officers should communicate. Young people are more suggestible than adults, especially under stress and with authority figures; a leading question from a uniformed officer is more likely to shape their answer. They are more likely to say they understand when they don't, to agree in order to please or to end an uncomfortable conversation, and to focus on the immediate situation rather than on consequences. Their vocabulary is smaller, and words that officers use every day, like 'detained', 'consent' or 'statement', may mean little to them. Many young people who come into contact with police have additional challenges, including learning disabilities, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, autism, mental health problems or trauma, which are often not obvious.

Bell gives the class his rules for talking with young people. Get down to their level physically if you can: sitting or crouching instead of standing over them. Introduce yourself by name. Use short sentences and everyday words. Ask one question at a time and wait. Use open questions, such as 'Tell me what happened', before specific ones. Avoid questions that suggest an answer, such as 'He pushed you, didn't he?' Check understanding by asking the young person to explain back in their own words, not by asking 'Do you understand?' Tell them what will happen next. And remember that a teenager who is rude or sullen may be frightened.

Ferreira knelt beside Ben and told him her name. She asked if he was hurt anywhere else, and called for an ambulance to check his elbow. Then she asked him to tell her what happened, from when he got to the court. Ben said he had been shooting baskets alone when two boys he 'sort of knew from school' came over. One, taller, with a red jacket, asked to see his phone. When Ben said no, the taller one pushed him hard and he fell. The other one grabbed his backpack strap and held it while the taller one took the phone out of his hand. They ran toward Lindell. Ferreira asked open follow-up questions about each part, and only then asked specific questions about their clothing, height and what they said. She did not ask Ben whether either boy was someone she suspected, although the description fitted two teenagers she knew well from the youth basketball program.

Stops, custody and young people

There is no special power to stop young people. The same Fourth Amendment rules apply: an officer may briefly detain a person for investigation under Terry v. Ohio (1968) only with reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. But a young person's age matters to how an encounter is assessed. In J.D.B. v. North Carolina (2011), the Supreme Court held that a child's age, if known to the officer or objectively apparent, is part of the analysis of whether a reasonable person would feel free to leave, because a child will sometimes feel pressured to submit when a reasonable adult would feel free to go. That affects when Miranda warnings are required, as lesson 6 explains. Ohio law, in Revised Code 2151.31, sets out when a child may be taken into custody, including under the law of arrest and when there are reasonable grounds to believe the child committed a delinquent act.

Desjardins adds that young people, especially racialized youth in neighborhoods with heavy police presence, often experience repeated stops that never lead to charges. Each one may be lawful on its own, but together they shape how a generation sees police. The community policing course covered the evidence on this. For youth officers, the practical lesson is that every contact either builds or spends trust, and that explaining the reason for a stop, and ending it as soon as the reason is gone, costs little.

Discretion and what shapes it

Most youth contacts involve discretion. Research on police decisions with young people has found that the seriousness of the offense and the young person's history are the strongest influences, as they should be. But other factors also play a role: the young person's demeanour, especially whether they are polite or hostile; the wishes of the complainant; whether a parent can be reached and seems able to supervise; and, in some studies, the young person's race and social class. Demeanour is a particular problem, because hostility toward police may reflect fear, past experiences or a disability rather than greater risk. Bell's unit tells officers to base decisions on the offense, the history, the victim's views and the young person's needs, and to be suspicious of any decision that rests mainly on attitude.

Use of force and restraint

Young people's size and age do not make them harmless, and officers sometimes need to use force with youth, including restraint and handcuffing. But the same principles of necessity and proportionality apply with special force. Restraint of a child or a small adolescent can cause injury, and positional asphyxia is a particular risk with prone restraint. Many services, including Port Ardent, have policies that require officers to consider the young person's age, size and any known disability, to use the minimum restraint necessary, and to remove handcuffs as soon as it is safe. Bell tells students that handcuffing a calm twelve-year-old in front of their classmates for a minor matter may be legal, but it will be remembered for years.

Police in schools

Schools are a frequent setting for youth contacts. School resource officers are common in American schools; a large share of public high schools have one. Supporters argue they improve safety, help prevent violence and build relationships. Critics argue that their presence turns ordinary school discipline problems, such as fights or disruptive behavior, into arrests and referrals to juvenile court, a pattern often called the school-to-prison pipeline, and that the effects fall most heavily on Black students and students with disabilities. Research on whether SROs reduce school violence is mixed, and several studies have found that SRO presence increases arrests for minor offenses. Many districts now use memorandums of understanding that limit SRO involvement in routine discipline, and Ohio law requires school resource officers to complete specific training. Port Ardent's agreement with the school district says the SRO does not handle matters that are school discipline issues rather than crimes.

Searches at school raise their own issues. In New Jersey v. T.L.O. (1985), the Supreme Court held that school officials may search a student without a warrant if they have reasonable suspicion that the search will turn up evidence that the student has violated the law or school rules, and the search is reasonable in scope. In Safford Unified School District v. Redding (2009), the Court held that a strip search of a 13-year-old girl for ibuprofen was unreasonable. When police are directing the search, or an SRO is acting as a police officer rather than a school official, many courts apply the ordinary probable cause standard. Police who want a student searched cannot ask the principal to do it for them.

The next morning

By 9 p.m. on May 14, Ferreira's team had a strong lead. Ben's phone's location service, which his mother shared with police, had last shown the phone in the Lindell Avenue towers at 5:02 p.m., before it was turned off. Two witnesses at the basketball court described the same two boys. Ferreira believed they were Devon Hart, 17, and Noah Kessler, 16, who lived in the towers. The next morning, the school resource officer at Eastgate High called Bell to say that Noah was at school and offered to bring him to the office so Bell could talk to him. Bell said no. He explained to the class: 'If I question a sixteen-year-old in the vice-principal's office, with the principal there and the door closed, he's going to feel he has no choice. Under J.D.B., a court is going to look at his age and the setting and probably find he was in custody. I'd rather do it properly, with his mother, at the station. And I don't want school to be the place where kids get arrested if I can avoid it.' Instead, Bell called Noah's mother, Karen Kessler, and asked her to bring Noah to the station after school. She agreed. What happened at the station is the subject of lesson 6.

# Check a youth unit's use of discretion for similar first-time thefts.
# Invented sample: each record is (group, outcome).
records = [("A", "warning")] * 34 + [("A", "referral")] * 10 + [("A", "charge")] * 2 + \
          [("B", "warning")] * 15 + [("B", "referral")] * 9 + [("B", "charge")] * 4
for g in ("A", "B"):
    sub = [o for grp, o in records if grp == g]
    share = sum(1 for o in sub if o == "warning") / len(sub)
    print("group", g, "cases:", len(sub), "warned:", round(share, 2))

group A cases: 46 warned: 0.74
group B cases: 28 warned: 0.54

In the invented sample, group A youth received a warning in about 0.74 of similar first-time thefts and group B youth in about 0.54. A gap like that does not prove bias by itself, because the cases may differ in ways the sample does not show, but it is exactly the kind of gap that should lead a supervisor to look at the files, as Port Ardent did in lesson 2.

Language, disability and the right support

Two kinds of support come up again and again in youth contacts. The first is language. When a young person or a parent has limited English, officers should use a professional interpreter, in person or by phone, as Ferreira did with Tariq Haidari's father. Officers should not use a child to interpret for their parents, or a sibling to interpret for a young suspect or victim: the child may not know the words, may soften or change what is said, and is placed in an impossible position. The second is disability. Many young people in contact with police have a diagnosed or undiagnosed condition that affects communication, memory or behavior. Signs can include difficulty following more than one instruction, repeating the officer's words back, agreeing with everything, unusual reactions to noise or touch, or difficulty with time and sequence. When an officer suspects a disability, they should slow down, simplify, ask a parent or caregiver what helps, and record what they observed, because it may matter later to whether the young person understood their rights. Bell says the most useful question he ever learned is simply, 'Is there anything that makes it hard for you to talk with me right now?'