"Arrest" is the first chapter of All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated, reprinted with permission from The New Press.

Anthony was a slight and restless boy of ten with pale skin and huge brown eyes. In a nearly bare office adjacent to the room where his grandmother was attending a support group, he was in and out of his chair, squirming and wriggling, his eyes wandering the room.

"I lived with my mother and her boyfriend and then they made drugs and sold them in the shed and I was in the house and they weren't even watching me," he said in one breath.

While his mother cooked methamphetamine, Anthony watched television. That is what he was doing the day the police came. Anthony was five years old. The police broke down the door, then smashed through the floorboards looking for drugs. Anthony remembers a lot of things shattered or crushed after that, things that had belonged to his grandfather. He remembers an officer putting him in the back of a police car. He was frightened, and didn't know where he was being taken.

"It's kiddie jail," he said of the children's shelter in which he found himself. "A jail for kids. Actually, it's not punishment. Actually, they punished me, though. Someone stole my watch. And they gave me clothes too small for me. They keep you in cells—little rooms that you sleep in, and you have nothing except for a bed, blankets, and sheets. You couldn't even go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. They wouldn't let you out."

At the shelter, Anthony cried for his mother and his grandmother. His grandmother came right away when she learned what had happened, but it was two and a half weeks—and three family court hearings—before Anthony was released from the shelter and permitted to go home with her. She lived in another county, and child welfare authorities insisted that she secure local housing before they would release Anthony to her care.

"He was in so much pain," she said of the boy who met her at the shelter. "He jumped in my arms from across the room and said, 'Granny, get me out of here.'"

Anthony remembers the day he left the shelter. "I had a Wolverine and an Incredible Hulk in a plastic baggie in one hand and the other hand was holding my grandma and we ran down the street as fast as we can, away from the shelter."

Anthony's mother is out of jail now, trying to stay clean. Anthony knows if she slips up, the police will take her away again. He fears it will happen to him, too. Because of the way he was taken there, and how little was explained to him, the shelter has come to haunt Anthony.

"The third time you go in the children's shelter, you can never go out until you're eighteen. My uncle told me, and it's true, too."

Anthony drew from his mother's arrest a few simple lessons: his mother was bad. He was bad. Authority was destructive. It is difficult to imagine a scenario in which a parent's arrest would not be wrenching for a child. But Anthony's fear and sorrow might have been eased by steps as simple as having someone take him into another room while his home was searched and talk to him about what was going on, or asking his mother if there were someone she might call to care for him.

These things happen, sometimes, when an individual officer thinks of them, or a chief mandates them. But the majority of police departments have no written protocol delineating officers' responsibility to the children of arrested parents, and those protocols that do exist vary widely in their wording and their implementation. A national survey by the American Bar Association (ABA) Center on Children and the Law found that only one-third of patrol officers will handle a situation differently if children are present. Of that third, only one in five will treat a suspect differently if children are present. One in ten will take special care to protect the children.

The result is that an event that is by its nature traumatic—the forcible removal by armed strangers of the person to whom children naturally look for protection—happens in ways that are virtually guaranteed to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, that trauma.

A national study found that almost 70 percent of children who were present at a parent's arrest watched their parent being handcuffed, and nearly 30 percent were confronted with drawn weapons. When researcher Christina Jose Kampfner interviewed children who had witnessed their mothers' arrests, she found that many suffered classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome—they couldn't sleep or concentrate, and they had flashbacks to the moment of arrest. If an arrested parent later returns home on parole or probation, officers often have license to enter the house at will—meaning that children may relive that trauma in their living rooms as well as their imaginations.

Police often plan raids for late-night or early-morning hours, when those they seek are most likely to be home with their families. That ups the odds that police will get their man, but also that children will awaken to see it happen. It should come as no surprise that sleep disorders follow.

Some narcotics officers report that they have children searched before releasing them to a relative or a shelter, in case they have drugs in their clothing or diaper. Washington Post re-porter Leon Dash interviewed the son of a longtime drug dealer and prostitute who recalled being forced to strip and spread his buttocks inside his own apartment during police raids.

When police deem children in need of child protective services, the majority deliver the children in a police car rather than having a child welfare worker pick them up in a less-intimidating vehicle. About one-fourth of police departments routinely bring children first to the police station rather than to a shelter or other civilian destination. Officers who find themselves responsible for children at the time of an arrest complain that their "babysitting" responsibilities interfere with their ability to do their real job.

"It is unfair to keep young children at the police station," one officer told the ABA researchers. "This is not a good place to watch children; there is no place to eat; they can't sleep here; we often don't have the supplies to take care of them, especially infants."

A child who is picked up by police officers, transported in a police car, and deposited at the police station—where he may be deprived of food and sleep—will almost inevitably experience himself as having been arrested. To all intents and purposes, he has been.

In one jurisdiction, police supervisors described the following protocol for handling the child of an arrestee when no relative is available to pick him up: first, officers take the child to the hospital for a physical examination. Next, they transport him to the local juvenile detention center to "fill out the necessary forms." Finally, they deposit him at a foster home.

This jurisdiction was presented as a model by the researchers who visited it. Both police and child welfare workers reported that their protocol was working efficiently and congratulated themselves and each other for their smooth collaboration. But try for a moment to imagine this circuit as a child might experience it (an exercise that is necessary because the researchers did not speak with any actual children). An armed and uniformed stranger handcuffs and takes away your parent, then places you in a police car, where you are separated from your rescuer by a metal grid. From where you sit, you can hear the crackle of the dispatcher on the radio reporting crimes and crises elsewhere in town. You are driven to the hospital, where you are required to take off your clothes and be scrutinized and prodded by another stranger. Then you are taken to a jail—just as your parent has been—where you sit in silence as the adults around you process the paperwork that will determine your immediate future. Finally, you are deposited at the home of yet another stranger, where you are given someone else's pajamas and sent off to sleep in an unfamiliar bed.

It is quite likely that the various adults this child will encounter along his route will make an effort to treat him kindly. The problem is not the callousness of individuals but the mechanical indifference of multiple bureaucracies, each of which functions according to its own imperatives. These bureaucratic exigencies—rather than children's experience—become the lens through which policies and protocols are drawn up and assessed. The system is viewed as "working" when it works for the institutions that comprise it—in itself, a legitimate end. But when children's experience is not also given priority, the effect is to leave children feeling afraid, alone, and unseen.

"I just wish the police would have talked to me like I was a part of it," said Christopher, who was whisked off to a foster home in the wake of his mother's arrest—"which I was. But they acted like I wasn't."

The trauma children experience when a parent is arrested may set the tone for their subsequent relationship with the criminal justice system. A natural desire to protect oneself and defend one's family evolves into a hatred of police, and authority generally—a rage that can make it difficult for a child to grow up to respect the law or trust its representatives.

"Adult lives are shaped by childhood experience," observed San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessy, who said children sometimes call his jail looking for their missing parents in the wake of an arrest. "If children are abused by the criminal justice system, they will have hostility towards law enforcement as adults. If they are treated fairly, and see government as a place to receive assistance as opposed to something that takes away rights, they will be more likely to reach out to and respect government as adults."

Ana, fifteen, has been watching her mother get arrested for years, for crimes such as forgery and drug possession. Once, she saw an officer snatch the cigarette from her mother's mouth and throw it to the ground. Another time, she heard her mother crying that the handcuffs were too tight and were hurting her. "I don't care," the officer answered.

Ana's brother, now five, witnessed these gratuitous cruelties throughout his early childhood. "When he sees the cops now, he'll run, because he's scared of them," Ana said. "He's all, 'They took my mommy and they hurt her.'"

Seeing one's parent helpless and restrained at an age when one still wants and needs to see her as omnipotent can be deeply disorienting. Lorraine watched police search her house and arrest her mother for drug offenses throughout her childhood. What left her most embittered, Lorraine said, was the fact that she rarely received an acknowledgment of her presence, much less an explanation.

"I was left thinking, 'What could my mother possibly have done that they can come in my home and invade my privacy?'" Lorraine said. "I'd watch them handcuff my mother and take her to jail, thinking, 'Don't they know that she is beautiful in my eyes, and that I could help her get better? That she has a child at home who yearns for her presence?' I remember crying to the police, 'Please don't take my mother away from me.' Yet time after time, I would watch them handcuff my mother, place her in the police car, and drive away, leaving me to wonder, 'Will I see her again?' I began to hate the police."

Children who do not manage to hate the authorities are likely to blame themselves. Jennifer was twelve years old when she returned home from science camp one afternoon to find police in her home. They arrested her mother and took Jennifer to a shelter. She felt, she said, "that my life was over. That I would never see my family again. I thought I had done something wrong, because I had to go away, too. But my family says I didn't."

Jennifer was twenty-seven years old when she told this story. She still didn't sound convinced.

A parent's arrest is the moment when a child's invisibility is made visible; when it is communicated to him most explicitly how little he will matter within the systems and institutions that lay claim to his family.

With appalling regularity, young people describe being left to fend for themselves in empty apartments for weeks or even months in the wake of a parent's arrest. In most cases, these children were not present when the parent was arrested; they simply came home from school to find their parent gone and were left to draw their own conclusions—not to mention cook their own dinner. But some told of watching police handcuff and remove a parent—the only adult in the house—and simply leave them behind. These stories bring home like no others the degree to which children are simply not seen, much less considered, within the criminal justice system.

The first time I heard such a story was from Ricky, then sixteen. Ricky's mother, like one-third of all incarcerated mothers, was living alone with her children at the time of her arrest. Ricky was nine years old, and his brother was under a year.

"The police came and took my mom, and I guess they thought someone else was in the house, I don't really know," Ricky said. "But no one else was in the house. I was trying to ask them what happened and they wouldn't say. Everything went so fast. They just rushed in the house and got her and left."

After that, Ricky did his best. He cooked for himself and his brother, and he changed the baby's diapers. "Sometimes he'd cry, because he probably would want to see my mother. But he was used to me, too," Ricky said.

Ricky burned himself trying to make toast and got a blister on his hand, but he felt he was managing. He remembered that each day, his mother would take him and his brother out for a walk. So he kept to the family routine, pushing the baby down the sidewalk in a stroller every day for two weeks, until a neighbor took notice and called Child Protective Services.

Social workers came and took Ricky's brother from him, just as police had his mother. The boys were sent to separate foster homes. Ricky saw his mother only once after that, years later, when he ran into her on the street and she told him she was working on getting him back. A year after that, he received a letter from a stranger with a hospital return address, telling him his mother had died. He never found out how she died, or what had happened to her in the years following her arrest.

I spoke with Ricky again a few years after our first meeting. He was nineteen, and doing well. He had been lucky in foster care; he had landed with a loving caregiver who had made a stable home for him. As a teenager, he had been contacted by his brother's adoptive parents and had been able to forge a new relationship with him. Now he was attending a suburban junior college, where he had been recruited for his football talents.

As we walked around campus, Ricky seemed calmer than when I had met him three years earlier, confident and happy in his new role as college athlete. It was late summer, and he was registering for classes and getting ready for the upcoming season.

We talked again about the events of his childhood. He offered some new details, but the story he told was identical in its outline to the one he had told me years earlier. I was less surprised now by what I was hearing, but no less confused.

The problem with Ricky's account is that it makes no sense. Why was his mother arrested? Why didn't she call from jail, or make some arrangement for her children's care? Why were they never reunited with her, or even permitted a visit? Why was he separated from his brother? Why did his mother not return for him as she had promised? Why on earth were two small children left alone in an empty apartment?

I pressed Ricky on these questions until he grew frustrated. He did not know, because no one had ever told him. The police were in a hurry, and so were the social workers. "All I know is that they just rushed me in the system and that was that. They didn't tell me why I can't go back with my mom."

The confusion I felt trying to sort out Ricky's history, with its gaping holes and incomprehensible events, simply reflected his own. Major pieces of his autobiography&mash;that part of it which unfolded in the days and years after his mother's arrest&mash;were not, and likely never would be, available to him.

When I first met Ricky, I was sure his story was exceptional. But the more I spoke with young people about their parents' arrest and incarceration, the less so it appeared.

Antonia was five years old when she saw her mother arrested on the street for prostitution. "I saw the police coming at me and I just ran," Antonia recalled. "As a child, I thought maybe they might arrest me. At five years old, I should have been aware of the police as good people who help you. Not, 'My mom is in the car with them!' Not, 'My mom is handcuffed!'"

Antonia ran home and told her older brothers what had happened. The children were on their own until their mother was released from jail a week later. Antonia remembers her ten-year-old brother trying to "be like the mother" during that time.

"When we would try to get junk food at the store, he would say, 'No, put that back.' We would burn food and he would get mad at us. 'I'm supposed to do the cooking! I deal with fire!'"

When young people describe the arrest of a parent, the sense one gets is not only of unnecessary trauma but also of tremendous missed opportunity. A child whose parent is arrested is likely already a vulnerable child. Arrest, reimagined, could be an opportunity to make that vulnerable child, and her family, visible; to make a bad situation better rather than worse.

As it stands, young people's reports of being overlooked or ignored are confirmed by law enforcement accounts. "I have taken and seen hundreds of children processed throughout my years in law enforcement," wrote one investigator in a handout prepared for a seminar at the California State Legislature. "The way these children are handled after a parent is arrested varies from, ignoring them, leaving them with a neighbor, leaving them alone with the promise that someone will be back from the store shortly.

"This area is highly overlooked and uncontrolled," he continued. "This area is like spousal abuse years ago. It was taken lightly and officers took the path of least resistance, until the law required specific actions. I think this problem is in the same realm."

Another police officer told a researcher, "Most cops do not like to and will not take kids into protective custody. It takes time, puts pressure on you from your agency, creates tons of paperwork, and CPS [Child Protective Services] isn't happy because they have other cases. There are all kinds of pressures [for law enforcement] not to take the kids."

Another officer was more succinct: asking after children, he told the researchers, would be "one more thing to do."

Some officers told the ABA researchers that they did not consider it necessary to inquire about children because they felt certain arrestees would always volunteer that information, in the hope of getting off easy because they had children. In fact, arrested parents may have a strong incentive not to tell police about children, or seek official help, because they fear losing their children to foster care—perhaps permanently—if they do so.

The alternative—making one's own arrangements for a child's care—is often difficult. Although many women arrestees are primary caregivers to children, they generally receive little or no assistance, or even access to a telephone, to make arrangements for children's care.

In 2001, Marcus Nieto of the California Research Bureau surveyed California police and sheriff's departments about their approach to the children of arrested parents. He found what he called a "de facto 'don't ask and don't tell' policy"—children were generally not considered a police responsibility unless they were perceived to be in grave danger.

When Nieto asked law enforcement personnel for their suggestions for improving police response to children of arrestees, the most popular answer was "nothing can be done." Those respondents who did see room for improvement primarily pointed to agencies other than their own.

While there is in general no statutory mandate for police to concern themselves with children at the time of an arrest, courts have occasionally held police liable for injuries to children left alone after a caretaker is arrested. White v. Rochford, the 1979 case that established the precedent for such liability, is based on a set of circumstances that tax the imagination. Police left three small children alone on a highway at night after arresting their uncle for a traffic violation. One child was hit by a car while crossing the freeway. The other two were later hospitalized with severe pneumonia.

A nine-year-old left alone with a baby—or a child venturing into traffic—does not go unnoticed indefinitely. When a Florida two-year-old spent nearly three weeks alone in an empty apartment after her mother was arrested—surviving on ketchup and dried noodles—the story made national news.

Teenagers are more likely to slip under the radar indefinitely—and most likely to be left alone in the first place. With few foster homes willing to take them, teenage children of arrestees are commonly left to fend for themselves at home. Even among police departments that told the ABA researchers they had a written policy outlining officers' responsibility for minor children of an arrested caretaker, only 55 percent defined "minor" as all children under eighteen. The rest offered definitions that ranged from sixteen and under to ten and under. In other words, children who would not be permitted to sign a lease, get a job, or enroll themselves in school because of their age were, as a matter of explicit policy, deemed old enough to be left behind in empty apartments should police find it necessary to take away their parents.

Terrence fell into this category. He was fifteen when police broke down the door of his home and arrested his drug-using mother. "'Call somebody to come watch you,'" he remembers an officer advising him on the way out.

"They were so busy trying to take my mom out, and the other people that were with her, they didn't care about me," Terrence said. "All they cared about was getting them people to jail that day."

"I was scared and angry," recalled Terrence, who had, as it happened, no one to call. "Then when I see my mama in a car, being hauled off, ain't comin' home, I'm feeling this sad feeling and angry feeling now. 'I gotta make it happen. I gotta help my mama.' I took it on me."

In his mother's absence, Terrence said, "I just cooked, cleaned, went to school. Stayed out of trouble. Really, that's all I could do. I stayed around other people a lot, 'cause I never liked being in my house all the time. It got lonely and it got scary."

Among Terrence's fears was that the police would return, this time for him. "I'm like, 'They could come kick in the door at any time again. They might think I'm doing something.'"

For a few weeks, Terrence got by on what was left of the family's food stamps. When they ran out, he could secure no more; only his mother's name was on the card required to pick them up each month. He cracked open his piggy bank, netting $56. When that was gone, he washed cars in the neighborhood and sold newspapers door to door. At fifteen, he was too young to get a real job.

"In my head I was like, 'I'm gonna be the man. I'm gonna pay the bills. I'm gonna try to do it,' " Terrence said, "but I just didn't know what to do. I just basically had to eat noodles and do what I could until my mom came home."

Terrence bought groceries with his earnings, but he couldn't keep up with the bills. The electricity got cut off, then the water and gas.

Once his apartment went dark, then cold, Terrence began spending more and more time with friends from school who lived together in a foster home nearby. When he began spending the night there, the foster father took notice and asked Terrence whether something was wrong at home. Terrence explained his situation, and the man arranged for Terrence to be placed with him on an emergency basis. Five months had passed since Terrence's mother's arrest before his solitary status registered as an "emergency" with any official entity.

Terrence was clearly a thoughtful boy with a strong sense of what he needed. Had the police simply asked him that question when they removed his mother, he likely would have told them.

He might also, had anyone asked, have offered his own vision for drug-policy reform, one that took his needs into account: "I think they shouldn't have took my mama to jail. Just made her go to court, and give her some community service, or some type of alternative, where she can go to the program down the street. Give her the opportunity to make up for what she did. Using drugs, she's hurting herself. You take her away from me, now you're hurting me."

"Hassle, Hassle, can't you get in trouble for scaring little kids with toy guns?"

"Hassle, if I find a million dollars and I give it to you, what would you do?"

"Hassle, am I old enough to go to jail?"

"Hassle, if you see sixteen grown men bothering people, you'll call for backup?"

"Hassle, I know how to drive. It's just that I'm short!"

Lieutenant Ray Hassett of the New Haven Department of Police Service had pulled over in order to confiscate a cap gun from a six-year-old who was apparently unaware that it was not wise to point it at an oncoming patrol car. The boy and his siblings took the opportunity to unleash a stream of questions and commentary they seemed to have been stockpiling for just such an occasion. A tangle of hands reached in to shake Hassett's, and five radiant faces pressed inside the open passenger window. Sugary residue from one girl's lollipop dripped onto the upholstery.

Hassett has been patrolling the streets of New Haven, Connecticut, for eighteen years. The nickname "Hassle" was conferred on him so long ago that the current crop of neighborhood kids knows him by no other. As we drove through New Haven's Chapel Dwight neighborhood, which skirts the Yale University campus, Hassett saw children everywhere he looked. It is in his nature, and also his training.

Hassett is one of the founding members of the Child Development-Community Policing Program (CD-CP), a fifteen-year-old collaboration between the New Haven Department of Police Service and the Yale Child Study Center (YCSC). The program is officially charged with healing the wounds that chronic exposure to violence inflicts on children and families, but it has reached beyond that mandate, transforming the way the police department handles everything from a homicide arrest to a traffic accident when children are present. In New Haven, children are now routinely seen, heard, and treated with care at the scene of an arrest.

The program was conceived in the early 1990s, when New Haven, like many American cities, was struggling to quell the crack trade and the violence that accompanied it. According to departmental legend, then-police chief Nicholas Pastore had been called to the scene of a homicide, where he saw several children huddled on a couch, their mother's dead body on the floor before them. As investigators went about their business, no one was paying attention to the clearly traumatized children. Pastore sought guidance from Dr. Donald J. Cohen, then the director of the Yale Child Study Center, and the CD-CP was born.

Dr. Steven Berkowitz, a child psychiatrist and the medical director of the CD-CP, is tweedy and bearlike, with curly brown hair and a salt-and-pepper beard. He has the kind of face that, if you were a child and your parents had been spirited away, you might consider trusting. The scenario Pastore encountered, said Berkowitz—kids on the couch, unnoticed and unattended—remains the norm in much of the country.

"Systems don't think," Berkowitz asserted. "They're more like machines—you turn on the switch and they just keep doing what they always do. The real question is, how do you get systems to think?"

Because police are often the first "system" representatives through the door, they represent an obvious starting point. Watching a parent arrested and taken away, Berkowitz noted, is itself one of the most significant traumas a child can experience. He has seen children respond by becoming unable to eat or to sleep, losing the ability to speak or use the toilet, or reverting from walking to crawling.

Through the CD-CP, New Haven police officers receive training in child development, and police supervisors are eligible for fellowships at the YCSC. Child Study Center clinicians are on call twenty-four hours, and they will come to the scene of a crime or an arrest, crayons in hand, to offer counseling and support. New Haven police refer children to the YCSC for treatment and counseling in the wake of parental arrest and other traumas. At weekly case conferences, police, probation officers, mental health workers, school representatives, and child welfare workers meet with YCSC clinicians to review cases involving children and police.

On the morning when I visited, the case-conferencing group was working its way through a three-page agenda packed with terse descriptions of imploding families: "A twenty-five-year-old mother of two tried to commit suicide." "As a result of her daughter's victimization by bullies over the past year, a mother left a threatening message on her teacher's voice mail." "Three children were discovered to be living with their grandmother in a crack house." "An eight-year old girl witnessed a domestic incident between her parents."

A New Haven police officer offered an account of a narcotics arrest the previous night. A ten-year-old boy had been in the back seat when his grandmother was arrested at gunpoint while making a drug deal. The boy, the officer reported, was terrified; CD-CP clinicians would follow up with offers of counseling and services via the aunt who was now caring for him. The YCSC receives an average of ten such police referrals each week and has seen about seven thousand police-referred children since the program's inception.

Hassett described a call the day before in Chapel Dwight: a two-year-old had been found wandering the streets in only a diaper and socks. Police had canvassed the neighborhood with a loudspeaker and had local television stations broadcast the boy's picture, but no one had claimed him. After several hours, a neighbor told police where the child lived. When police visited the house, they found that a seventeen- and a thirteen-year-old had been left in charge of six younger siblings. The toddler had walked out while the teenagers were trying to get everyone into bed. When the parents returned home—the father had gone to pick the mother up from work—they assumed the boy was asleep, and his absence went unnoticed. By the time police tracked down the family, the child welfare department had already placed the child in a foster home.

At the CD-CP meeting, a child welfare worker interpreted this account by remarking that when he leaves his children with a babysitter, he makes sure the sitter has his cell phone and pager numbers. A police officer offered an opposing view: his daughter had once wandered a quarter-mile from the house as a toddler, and he didn't consider himself a negligent parent.

As he would throughout the meeting, YCSC psychoanalyst Dr. Steven Marans directed the conversation away from competing adult perspectives and toward a child's-eye view. "I've treated children who've had removals [from their homes] at an early age," he cautioned. "Timing is essential. Twenty-four hours in the life of a two-year-old is a lifetime. I don't fault child welfare for looking at safety, but we need to take extra steps to determine the best interest of the child. Is there a relative down the street that the kid has spent time with? From a child's perspective, that two-year-old deserves that."

The CD-CP has been replicated in thirteen cities, and New Haven police and YCSC staff regularly consult with police from other cities in the hope of sharing what they have learned and spreading the model. The day I was there, a visiting officer from Providence, Rhode Island—which is developing a program modeled on New Haven's—picked up on Marans's cue, noting that Hassett's decision not to arrest the parents for child endangerment had likely spared the boy's siblings significant trauma.

"We're not going to arrest our way out of poverty," New Haven police chief Francisco Ortiz told me after the meeting, "so we have to start here, thinking about the children."

The Chapel Dwight neighborhood was, as Hassett dryly put it, "busy" on the spring afternoon when I accompanied him on his rounds through the four-square-mile district in which he had spent the past eight years. "Wussup? Wussup?" Hassett called gamely to young men on stoops and street corners as we crawled through the neighborhood at ten miles an hour, windows open. Some offered a brisk nod. Most looked away. One grimaced visibly.

A burly white man with a bristly, Mohawk-like strip of hair dividing his otherwise-shaved head into neat halves, Hassett wore a shirt and tie underneath his uniform. His oval sunglasses sat mid-forehead, obscuring his eyebrows. Before the need for a steady paycheck drove him to police work two decades earlier, Hassett had been a stage and screen actor in London and Los Angeles. He appeared in films including Body Double and The Spy Who Loved Me, and he played one of Harrison Ford's stormtroopers in The Empire Strikes Back. He has been cast as a police officer more than once, but he likened his current role to that of a country doctor.

Much of Hassett's work on the afternoon I spent with him involved cleaning up the messes that had filled the agenda of the morning's CD-CP meeting. At the police station, reporters from two local television stations were awaiting comment on the stray toddler. Hassett assumed a classic cop stance for the camera—feet wide apart, hands folded—but offered the reporters little else. It was, after all, not much of a story—working parents, a houseful of kids. The reporters' questions trailed off and they packed up their equipment.

Hassett pulled up outside the neighborhood middle school—a block-sized brick square on barren grounds—as it was letting out. "Hi poleeeeeceman!" a girl shouted. Hassett tried his "wussup" again on a crowd of boys heading for the bus. Finally, he got an audible "wussup" in return. His face offered no clue as to whether he heard the sarcasm in the boy's tone.

A school crossing guard accosted Hassett, outraged about the two-year-old: "How could you forget the baby?"

Inside, a secretary also had an opinion to share: "I wanna beat that lady up about that baby last night."

"It's not as bad as you think," Hassett told her.

"I think kids should be very closely supervised."

"It's not as bad as you think."

"A mistake? OK. But I still wanna whup her."

"Everyone was out for blood last night," Hassett told me. "They wanted to see somebody coming out in cuffs. It's a little more time-consuming to look at the real situation—a family that is overwhelmed and needs childproof locks on their door. I'm trying to bring everyone down a bit. The family is probably mortified."

The school principal stopped Hassett to confer about the mother who had left the message threatening a teacher. Hassett listened quietly as the principal offered his perspective. "She said some very inflammatory things," Hassett told me later of the middle-schooler's mother. "We certainly had enough probable cause to arrest her. Would that have solved anything? If you're looking at the child as being the focus of the behavior, would that have helped the child? I don't think so." Hassett was, however, worried about the girl, who kept getting into fights at school, and he hoped the threat of police involvement would be leverage enough to get the reluctant mother to allow her daughter to be seen at the YCSC.

On the standard New Haven police-report form, there is a space in which an officer is required to list all children present at the scene and check off whether the YCSC was consulted. If a caregiver declines services and the officer thinks the kids need them, he'll knock on the door in a day or two and extend the offer again. I asked Hassett about the view that police exist to ensure public safety, not act as "social workers" or "babysitters." Hassett bristled at the distinction. Encouraging kids to see cops as the enemy, he explained, does not enhance public safety—nor, for that matter, police safety. One of the archetypal CD-CP stories, in fact, involves a child, who had been well treated by police in the past, saving an officer's life by warning him of an imminent ambush.

"For a lot of the kids, their parents getting locked up is not new," Hassett said. "It's part of daily life. I have to go back to the house again and again. Do I wanna fight every time I go there? No. Do I wanna be able to have them open the door instead of kicking it down? Yes. Having a rapport with the family helps get the job done in a safe manner.

"The last thing I want to be seen as is the bad guy coming in there. We're the good guys. So you take a little extra time. You sit down, say, 'How you doin',' look around and ask about the toys he has—just like you would with your own kids. When you go into a house to investigate an incident, your work isn't done until you take a look at those kids."

This kind of interaction, Steven Berkowitz observed, can do more than encourage kids to open the door to the cops. "If you set it up so that authority and the police are the bad guys, then what reason would any child have to think that doing the right thing is going to be good for them?" he asked. "Now here's the supreme example of authority in society saying, 'I'm here, I'm listening, and I'm not bullshitting you.' It's a huge difference. Do I think it's going to detraumatize or heal? No. But I think it gives them a rope."