“Intervention Package”: An Analysis to Prepare Juvenile Delinquents for Encounters with Police Officers

Three experiments were conducted (1) to identify the important behaviors of police-youth interaction, (2) to teach four of these behaviors to three court-adjudicated delinquent youths, and (3) to validate the changes through the use of subjective ratings by police officers and a group of citizens from the community. The data suggest that training improved the police officers' subjective impressions of the youths and may have decreased the probability of the youths' being taken into custody, being stopped again, or being labeled as troublemakers.