“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.”
