Upstream Intervetion
An easy way to protect children is to obligate judges to ask two questions:
- 1Does the suspect have children with whom they reside?
- 2Is a summons an acceptable alternative?
A summons automatically protects children from witnessing the painful process of parental arrest. However, if an arrest is absolutely necessary, then judges (having been already made aware of the presence of children by the first question) can demand that the arrest be carried out in a location away from children such as the suspect’s work or with children away at school/daycare.
How to create this judicial point of intervention
There are many organizations that are working on behalf of the victims of the abuses of the American legal justice system and its inequities. This is a broad and complex social issue that has many layers and political nuances. However, the beauty of this plan is in its simplicity (2 additional questions), its relative ease of implementation, and its limited scope both as far as eliciting change as well as advocating for innocent children who are by definition a bipartisan area of agreement.
Action Plan:
- 1Reach out to the chief judge’s in each state to implement this protocol in all their courtrooms and with all their judges.
- 2Reach out to legislators to pass legislation obligating judges to ask these two questions and propose alternatives to child witnessed arrest at federal level
Conclusion
My theory is that with 800,000 police officers in the country, the burden of retraining and sensitizing is enormous. I thought about pushing for intervention at the judicial level, whereupon any judge that is asked to issue a warrant should first ask if the person is a parent and if so, could the alternative of a court summons be considered? If a summons is not an option, then the judge should mandate that the arrest be carried out away from the children, for example at work. With only 30,000 state judges and 1700 federal judges, I feel this might be a more viable and efficient avenue.
