Date Published: 04/26/07
Strained services frustrate police
It's 2 a.m. and a police officer has arrested a 15-year-old boy for kicking down trash cans and urinating in public amid the thick crowds of Spring Break.
The child's parents are nowhere to be found, so the officer takes the boy to the Juvenile Assessment Center. But the crime is a misdemeanor, not enough for detention.
What's a cop to do?
Daytona Beach Police Chief Mike Chitwood says his officers are already doing too much after they arrest youngsters who have committed crimes.
The chief said police are fingerprinting arrested children -- since the beginning of the year the department has compiled about 270 juvenile fingerprints -- and sometimes driving around in the middle of the night searching for the parents of a young burglar or robber.
And with juvenile crime on the rise in Daytona Beach, Chitwood says he's caught in a quandary because his officers are saddled with too many responsibilities.
"There needs to be a central repository for juveniles," Chitwood said. "The kids need to be taken to one single place where they can be fingerprinted, photographed, screened and counseled."
Between 2005 and 2006, overall crimes committed by juveniles in the city rose 9.8 percent, records show. The most popular crimes for children were robbery, burglary and auto theft.
No one agrees more with Chitwood than Rick Rademacher, director of the Juvenile Assessment Center. The center is where police in Volusia and Flagler counties must call after juvenile arrests to determine whether child offenders will be detained or released to their parents.
The state's Department of Juvenile Justice -- which runs the 90-bed Volusia Regional Juvenile Detention Center -- contracts with Stewart-Marchman Center for Chemical Independence to run the Juvenile Assessment Center. Staff members evaluate children to decide where they should be while awaiting court hearings. Children with drug problems and mental illness also are evaluated there.
The problem is, Rademacher says, Volusia's is not a full-service center like those in Orange and Seminole counties. Because the local center is strapped for funding and personnel -- there is only one probation officer on duty at the center after midnight -- strict guidelines dictate whether an arrested child will be taken to juvenile detention.
In other words, if little Johnny is caught burglarizing a car, it does not mean he will automatically end up in juvenile detention. Police say youngsters are being dropped off at home only to repeat their crimes the next day.
"This (issue) is building to a crescendo," Rademacher said Wednesday. "In a perfect world, we would have a full-service Juvenile Assessment Center where kids are fingerprinted, photographed, screened and tested for drugs.
"But I don't have enough officers," Rademacher said.
Rademacher says the Volusia-Flagler area needs a one-stop center for juvenile suspects, instead of leaving those tasks up to police.
Daytona Beach Lt. Craig Capri had such an incident during Spring Break when one of his sergeants arrested a teenager who was wreaking havoc, kicking trash cans and urinating in public.
Because the sergeant could not find the child's parents, he drove the boy to the Juvenile Assessment Center, only to be turned away because the boy's crimes were not severe enough.
According to state law, a child must have committed a first- or second-degree felony or a capital offense, be found with a weapon or wanted on a warrant to be held in detention facility. The child's criminal history could also play a key role, Rademacher said.
That was not the case with the trash-can kicking teen.
"When we finally found the mother, she was drunk," Capri said. "That took about two hours of our time."
A meeting scheduled this week between assessment center staff, police officials, Halifax Behavioral Services, the school system and others from the state's Department of Juvenile Justice to discuss possible creation of a full-service center was postponed, Rademacher said.
"The state had told us to get a full-service JAC on line quickly," Rademacher said. "Let's get everyone to the table."
Chitwood, for one, says he's willing to "sit on any panel that would bring that about."
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Juvenile crime by the numbers
Juvenile crime is on the rise in Daytona Beach, police say. Without a full-service juvenile assessment center in the county that screens children to determine whether they should be placed in detention or referred to other social services, police are having to fingerprint juveniles and often release them to their parents even when they commit certain crimes such as burglary.
Records show that between 2005 and 2006, juvenile crime rose 9.8 percent in the city.
The three crimes with the highest increases in juvenile arrests between 2005 and 2006 include:
ROBBERY:
2005 - 2
2006 - 25
BURGLARY:
2005 - 18
2006 - 43
AUTO THEFT:
2005 - 22
2006 - 30
SOURCE: Daytona Beach Police
Did you know?
Fingerprint identification originated in the late 19th century when the British anthropologist Sir Francis Galton calculated that no two people could have exactly the same fingerprint patterns.
• In the 1880s, Galton designed the first system of fingerprint classification based on groupings of various print patterns.
• Galton's system was improved upon by two police officers, Juan Vucetich of Argentina and Sir Edward R. Henry of Great Britain. This system was officially introduced at Scotland Yard in 1901 and is the basis of most fingerprinting methods used today.
— Compiled by News Researcher Janice Cahill
SOURCES: about.com; livescience.com; World Book Encyclopedia
By LYDA LONGA
Daytona Beach News-Journal
April 26, 2007
lyda.longa @news-jrnl.com
Source: Daytona Beach News-Journal |