Child and adolescent psychiatric clinics of North America
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Child Adolesc Psychiatr Clin N Am · Jul 1998
Police and mental health professionals. Collaborative responses to the impact of violence on children and families.
Coordinating responses through the Child Development-Community Policing Program has led to multiple changes in the delivery of clinical and police services. Mental health clinicians and police officers have developed a common language for assessing and responding to the needs of children and families who have been exposed to or involved in violence. Learning from each other, these unlikely partners have established close working relationships that improve and expand the range of interventions they are able to provide while preserving the areas of expertise and responsibilities of each professional group. ⋯ The institutions that function in the inner city--schools, police, mental health and child welfare agencies, churches--are all concerned about the same children and families. By working together, with a shared orientation to the best interests of the children, they can intervene earlier and more effectively: first, to disrupt the trajectory leading to violence; and, second, to help those children who are already caught in the web of exposure to violent crime and inner-city trauma. The experience with community-based policing and mental health in New Haven, now being replicated throughout the United States, can thus stand as a model of an active social response to an overwhel