Dispatches From the Field: The Call for Law Enforcement to Address ACEs

“When I looked at a lot of the situations police dealt with, I recognized that the interventions we were doing were important and should continue, but if I was true to the definition of community-oriented policing, I had to consider the root cause. The root cause is trauma, and kids are exposed to trauma in a lot of cases.” – Police Chief Christopher Leusner

Interview with Christopher Leusner

You’ve spoken about how learning about Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and their impact on children transformed the strategies that you wanted to employ in policing. Tell us about how you were first exposed to information about ACEs and how that knowledge influences your work?

I was promoted to Chief of Police in Middle Township on October 1, 2009, and I wanted to take the Police Department to the next level when it came to community problem-oriented policing. I wanted to develop a real partnership with the community to get at the root causes of crime and social disorder. If you look at various definitions of community problem-oriented policing, the word “cause” is always part of it — there’s an emphasis on looking deeper at problems to understand the cause. So we started to employ certain strategies.

For example, in 2014 we put a trained social worker in our municipal court to try to understand why someone was coming in contact with the criminal justice system and what we could do to prevent that in the future. Was it a mental health issue? Was it a housing issue? Was it related to being a veteran? We connected people with services and were involved in interventions. I had to convince a Council committee to spend $20,000 to put that social worker in our court, but those important programs continue to this day.

I learned about ACEs in 2016. Our local hospital asked me to be part of a coalition of stakeholders in the community when they applied for a grant to build a culture of health in Cape May County. We started to analyze the different issues that we were having. I went in thinking about the opioid epidemic and my counterparts in education and mental health and healthcare spoke about some of the challenges they faced. We came across the ACEs study and we said, “Wow, this is connected to all of us. We need to go upstream to really have an impact.”

When I looked at a lot of the situations police dealt with, I recognized that the interventions we were doing were important and should continue, but if I was true to the definition of community problem- oriented policing, I had to consider the root cause. The root cause is trauma, and kids are exposed to trauma in a lot of cases.

That’s where my strategy changed. I broke things down into three categories. We already had enforcement and intervention, but the prevention category is where we needed to be. An investment there saves so much money on the other end. So that’s where we started to add things relating to responsible policing and building connections with kids. How could we reduce the dose of trauma, and partner in the community with schools and other organizations to try to build connections and protective factors in the community? Those seeds we plant grow and have a significant return on investment when done together as a community.

Was it a challenge to impart these new strategies to the police officers who serve in your Department?

Training had to be the foundation. We had to get this information into the hands of officers and explain to them the “why.” Why should they care about this? We had to explain why this is in the lane of public safety, and that the investment would have a return on public safety. I developed the training with the help of Dr. Lori Desautels from Butler University, who is in the field of educational neuroscience, and delivered the training myself, which is unusual. We have 64 officers that I’m responsible for and if you add in our civilian personnel, around 90-100 employees were trained.

As part of the training, every officer saw the film, Resilience: The Biology of Stress, & the Science of Hope, which does a great job explaining ACEs. The goal of my training with the officers was to change the mindset from, “What’s wrong with this kid?” to, “What happened to this kid?” And if you can look at it through that lens, you have an opportunity to consider what might be good strategies, solutions, or responses.

Were there other aspects of the training that you think had a significant impact?

Well, it’s also important to talk about the trauma that police officers experience. We’ve got to give officers the skills to be trauma-informed with themselves before we send them in the community to be trauma-informed with others. Because police officers do see a lot of terrible stuff.

I don’t know any way to explain it other than the fact that it just lives inside of you. I remember the first car accident I was on as a police officer. I was 21-years-old and there was a 21-year-old kid that had been killed, and the music was still playing in the car. It was terrible. I was thinking, “Man, this kid was listening to this song five, ten minutes ago and now he’s not here.” And over the course of your career, you see more things — crimes against children and violent crime and just the negative calls that you have day-in and day-out. You see that type of suffering every day and you are exposed to so much.

We’ve got to give them skills to cope with that, so they can be healthy. Officer wellness is really important. And I did talk about that, because I had an officer who committed suicide in 2012 and that really rocked our department. Every police officer either has someone in their department or someone that they know very close by that committed suicide. I think the suicide rate among police officers ranks second, after veterans in this country. Along with substance abuse and alcoholism, there are a lot of really negative health outcomes among police officers. I talked about this with them: “Think about the trauma that we’ve seen, think about some of our colleagues that have struggled with it, and then think about a child that doesn’t have the support system of a police department, that doesn’t have a brain that’s fully developed.”

So I do think approaching it this way created an opportunity, where we got through to them. We saw a shift in the officers — not all of them, but a lot. I think the more we do it, the more buy-in we’ll get. And it works in tandem with getting officers involved in police youth camps and other initiatives where officers can have positive interactions with kids when there’s not a problem, crisis, or emergency. Both the kids and the police officers benefit from that.

The Handle With Care program, which relies on a partnership between law enforcement and public schools, is being rolled out across New Jersey. You implemented it in Middle Township starting in 2018. Can you describe the program and the results it’s had in your county?

Handle With Care was started in West Virginia. It’s a program where the police notify a child’s school when the child was present at a traumatic event. The police officer uses a one-page form that just has the name of the student, the date and time the form is filled out, and the date and time of the incident. No information about the incident itself is provided.

The goal is to get the notice to the school before the bell rings the following day, so the school doesn’t compound the trauma. The teacher is aware that something happened the night before and can use that lens if the child doesn’t do their homework or if they’re falling asleep in class or if they’re exhibiting a behavioral issue. Police may have been in the home until two o’clock in the morning for a domestic violence complaint, or maybe there was an arrest of an adult in the home the night before, or there was a car accident, or a violent crime and a child was present. If the teacher doesn’t get a notice that something happened, they can add to the trauma, but if they get the notice they’re going to view that situation through a completely different lens. In Middle Township, in our first year, there were 110 situations where a child was just present during a traumatic event or witnessed it. We’ve had a lot of success with the program and received really good feedback from the teachers. I know we’ve impacted kids’ lives in a positive way because of it.

What has the learning curve been like during the years that you’ve run Handle With Care?

When we started the program, there was a fourth grader who went into the School Resource Officer’s office at his school to see Officer Julio, and the student was crying. Officer Julio asked, “What happened?” And the boy said, “Well, Mommy and Daddy were fighting last night, and the police were there.” But there was no Handle With Care referral. So Officer Julio went back through the calls and we verified that there had been a service call and police had been in this fourth grader’s home.

When I asked why no form had been filled out, the officer said, “Chief, we didn’t do the form because the kids were sleeping. The kids were present, but they were sleeping.” Well, the kids weren’t sleeping. They heard everything. So we made adjustments. I explained that, “even if you think kids are sleeping, let’s do the form. Let’s notify the school so they can have that information.” You can see the child was impacted and it would have been good for the school to know in advance, and you can also see the trust this student had with Officer Julio.

Officer Julio has lunch with different groups of kids every week. The kids love him, and he loves the kids. It’s so important to have the right officer in that environment. We’ll include a kid who was a Handle With Care referral in that group of kids at lunch, without them knowing that’s why they are included. It’s called a “follow-up visit” – a positive interaction with a trusted adult after a traumatic event.

We had another situation in a high school where a child came through the doors and the School Resource Officer said, “Man, something’s off with that kid today.” He went back and looked for a Handle With Care referral but there was none. We did find out that the student had been removed from his home by Children and Family Services and put in a shelter. It was three o’clock in the morning when he got checked in. He woke up at 7 am and went to school. It would have been so useful for the principal and the teachers at that student’s school to have some sense of that.

The connection between schools and law enforcement is really critical. Handle With Care is a very important and simple program. I’ve told police chiefs across the state, “This is something really simple that you can do to take that first step towards instituting some trauma-informed practices.”

Do you believe that knowledge of ACEs and trauma-informed practices could be more integrated on a societal level to create real change?

Absolutely. A trauma-informed community is the end goal in my view, and there needs to be cross-effort collaboration to make that happen. You hear Lori Desautels and Mike McKnight [who’s an educational specialist and a co-author with Desautels] talk, and they say, “You need to meet the child at their brain development.” They explain how the brain is adapting differently with a child that has had a lot of toxic stress: the amygdala is activated more easily and there are triggers that will happen with kids that have experienced toxic stress. Now, with that lens and having that additional information, you are going to see different strategies in managing difficult situations. A key is to have people in various sectors understand this.

We’ve been doing resiliency team training for teachers so they can have that awareness and understanding, and we do this in some of our policing training with police officers. We taught police officers to understand what’s going on inside the mind and the body and then use strategies to regulate a child who has become dysregulated, as opposed to immediately moving to, “Okay, this child’s misbehaving. You’re going to go to the office. You’re going to be disciplined.” Breath and movement and amygdala reset stations and all the kinds of things that Lori Desautels and Mike McKnight are talking about are really important in the education system.

Ultimately, I think this is the kind of investment that — over the long term — will result in a better education system and better outcomes for the kids in school, which mean better outcomes in society. It’s certainly the case in my world of public safety when there are situations in the community where we have to respond. I think it also applies to recreation and our sports coaches and other people involved with kids. The business community can also play an important role. We have done a number of presentations on ACEs to the Chamber of Commerce. We’re a seasonal community where a lot of kids get their first job at 14, and they work on the beach, or at the resort communities. Think about the impact that their first boss can have on these kids!

There is a lot of attention on police brutality in the country right now, and tensions exist between communities and police officers as a result. As Chief of Police, how have you addressed this issue?

While we didn’t choose our community problem-oriented policing approach specifically for this purpose, I think that approach, along with other efforts, has helped build trust with the community. It’s building those relationships, interacting with our community so we see each other as fellow human beings. Yesterday, some of our officers were playing kickball with kids in the neighborhood. For officers to get out of the car and play kickball and interact with parents in the community, it’s positive for the community to see that; it’s based around positive interactions, where we’re enjoying each other’s company. I think that’s healthy for the community. I think it’s healthy for the officers because, again, we’re going to have those negative calls. We’re going to have those situations where there’s going to be a crime, there’s going to be a domestic violence incident, and we’ll have to handle that. We do our best to handle things in a way in which we’re fair, we’re impartial, and we’re transparent. We hope the community sees that we are always looking to improve in everything we do in the department.

But that element of engaging the community, especially our youth, that’s one thing we can all rally around together. We used to have one [police department-sponsored] program in our school in the fifth grade, our DARE program. We now have a program in the third grade, fifth grade, seventh grade, and 10th grade. We have a police youth camp that will start in a few weeks. We have an e-gaming cops program where kids play video games with cops, we have a trading card program, and a Paws on Patrol program. These are part of a comprehensive plan that we have to invest in our kids and I think if the community sees that effort, that sustained effort, that goes a long way toward building trust and bringing the community together.

What role can we, in the community, play to support children?

I’ve talked to some of my officers who grew up with some very challenging circumstances. They talk about a teacher or a cop that made a difference in their life. Now, if you’d ask that teacher or cop about it, they’d say, “What did I do? I took some interest in the kid. I saw the kid, and I spent some time with him.” They didn’t realize the impact they had and how long that impact would last. So that’s another piece that we have to educate folks about: If you’re a parent, or a coach, or a teacher, being that trusted adult, building that relationship, creating that connection is critical. You don’t know how far it can go.

If we all just do a little bit, if you’re a parent and you know that friend of your child is going through a tough time, maybe their parent lost a job or is going through a divorce, or maybe even worse, you can do something about it. “Oh, let’s bring that kid over for dinner.” “Let me give him a ride.” “Hey, let’s include them in what we’re doing.” Or maybe a coach or a police officer in the community knows that this kid is going through a tough time: “Let me make a little bit more effort.” If we could all do that, that starts to build pretty quickly and I do think you move the needle. It really is going to take a community.