By Meryl Davids Landau, The New York Times, July 17, 2021
The day Brian Lowe attended a training session for police officers on understanding the minds of teenagers, he knew his job would never be the same.
Mr. Lowe, a lieutenant in the sheriff’s office in Tippecanoe County, Ind., immediately recalled encounters with young people in the past — the teens he’d handcuffed for trespassing in a closed park in the middle of the night while hanging out with friends, the students he’d arrested for stealing a cafeteria sandwich. Like most police officers across the country, he had been taught to act as an enforcer, with the idea that teenagers should not get away with anything an adult would not.
But in the training session, “Policing the Teen Brain,” Mr. Lowe learned all the ways that adolescents are different from adults. For instance, because of their less-developed prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain charged with problem solving and controlling irrational behavior — and the coursing hormones of puberty, they are not always in command of their actions. Children who have suffered violence or other trauma are even more likely to become emotionally unstable under stress.
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