First, do no harm: Model practices for law enforcement agencies when arresting parents in the presence of children

One of the most traumatic events a child can experience is the arrest of a parent. In the short term, children whose parents are arrested experience the trauma of the arrest itself and often the stress of changes to their living situation. In the long term, they grapple with a range of trauma-induced physical and mental health issues, which can lead to negative academic, behavioral and justice system outcomes. These outcomes harm not only the children involved but also society as a whole, which misses out on potential productivity and must devote more resources to schools, social services, law enforcement and courts. Law enforcement agencies are in a unique position to limit this harm in three key ways. First, they can modify their procedures to make arrests less traumatic for children. Second, they can adopt protocols to ensure children are accounted for, left with competent caregivers and otherwise protected from harm in the aftermath of a parental arrest. Third, they can collaborate with social workers and child advocates to connect children of arrested parents with the services they need. This report outlines several model practices that law enforcement agencies can use to translate these three broad possibilities into effective policies and practices

If Not Now, When? A Survey of Juvenile Justice Training in America's Police Academies

Over the past decade, police have become a ubiquitous presence in the lives of many youths, particularly those living in disadvantaged communities. They are now routinely deployed in public schools. As social and mental health services have been scaled back, police are frequently the first responders in domestic disputes involving juveniles.Exposure and training in how to recognize mental health issues, along with best practices for improving positive outcomes for youth and their communities, will ensure a more judicious, effective and cost-efficient use of available resources, as well as increased public safety and improved relations between youths and police.Strategies for Youth urges police academies to increase the scope, depth and focus of training to equip police with a variety of tools and strategies for encounters with youths

Where's the State?

Today's youth, particularly youth of color and those living in urban areas, encounter law enforcement officers wherever they go. Officers patrol their streets, roam their school hallways, supervise their dances and athletic events, and guard many of the buildings they regularly enter. A police station often abuts their schools, parks, and recreation facilities. Law enforcement officers are the gatekeepers for the justice system. They determine who is arrested, who is not, and who enters into the juvenile justice system. These decisions dramatically and permanently alter a youth's educational and professional opportunities and can have a profound effect on the child's overall wellbeing and health. Clear standards, in combination with rigorous training, would promote a culture in which evaluation and promotion decisions are based upon officers' ability to successfully keep encounters with youth peaceful and positive, rather than on their arrest rates. State implementation of these standards also would improve overall public safety by providing officers with vital tools to de-escalate encounters with young people

Imitation Learning:A Survey of Learning Methods

Imitation learning techniques aim to mimic human behavior in a given task. An agent (a learning machine) is trained to perform a task from demonstrations by learning a mapping between observations and actions. The idea of teaching by imitation has been around for many years; however, the field is gaining attention recently due to advances in computing and sensing as well as rising demand for intelligent applications. The paradigm of learning by imitation is gaining popularity because it facilitates teaching complex tasks with minimal expert knowledge of the tasks. Generic imitation learning methods could potentially reduce the problem of teaching a task to that of providing demonstrations, without the need for explicit programming or designing reward functions specific to the task. Modern sensors are able to collect and transmit high volumes of data rapidly, and processors with high computational power allow fast processing that maps the sensory data to actions in a timely manner. This opens the door for many potential AI applications that require real-time perception and reaction such as humanoid robots, self-driving vehicles, human computer interaction, and computer games, to name a few. However, specialized algorithms are needed to effectively and robustly learn models as learning by imitation poses its own set of challenges. In this article, we survey imitation learning methods and present design options in different steps of the learning process. We introduce a background and motivation for the field as well as highlight challenges specific to the imitation problem. Methods for designing and evaluating imitation learning tasks are categorized and reviewed. Special attention is given to learning methods in robotics and games as these domains are the most popular in the literature and provide a wide array of problems and methodologies. We extensively discuss combining imitation learning approaches using different sources and methods, as well as incorporating other motion learning methods to enhance imitation. We also discuss the potential impact on industry, present major applications, and highlight current and future research directions