WEST ORANGE YOUTH SERVICES PROJECT

In a northern New Jersey municipality, local policemen are working hand in hand with university authorities on human relations in a program designed to help youngsters in trouble and to help the police help the youngsters stay out of trouble.

They call the program MAYBE (Many Aiding Youth By Experience) but there seem to be few ‘maybes’ voiced over the effectiveness of the project in promoting understanding between the police and youngsters enrolled in the program and their families.

The municipality is West Orange, a suburb of Newark in populous Essex County, The project is being run by the West Orange Youth Service Bureau in conjunction with the West Orange Police Department and Seton Hall University, with the aidof a $95,649 action grant provided through the State Planning Agency.

The program was devised initially to give all West Orange police officers training designed to enable them to relate better with youngsters and to understand their needs and problems. The Seton Hall educators providing the training have in turn been getting the policemen’s point of view by spending hours riding in patrol cars and monitoring calls and reports at police headquarters.

The theory, explains one of the professors, is that police can give emotional or psychological first aid ori the beat just as they give physical first aid; that training in behavioral sciences enables the policemen to deal more effectively with people and their problems.

The second phase of the program is the counseling service bureau which is staffed by twelve counselors from Seton Hall plus four group therapists, a psychiatrist and a psychologist.

Between last October and mid-May, the service agency had treated nearly 200 boys and girls between the ages of thirtee n and twenty. The program, aimed at preventive action, is open without charge to any resident of West Orange but most of the youngsters come in through referrals from the police. Youths who have appeared in Juvenile Court can have their records cleared if they agree to counseling and are judged to be making progress in the program. The actual counseling is confidential and winds up with the youngster’s family joining him in counseling sessions.

People close to the program say the municipality’s youngsters are beginning to see policemen in a new light-that they realize police aren’t out just to arrest them but are willing to help them out. Representatives from another state have come into West Orange and plan to use the program as a model for one of their own.

New Jersey State Law Enforcement Planning Agency Al Drake 447 Bellevue Avenue Coordinator of Trenton, New Jersey 08618 Public Information