Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Police youth mentoring programs are common in police departments throughout the United States. They perform various functions and engage the youth in different ways. They are typically broad in their scope, encompassing a wide range of informal and formal mentoring strategies. This paper explores the administration of police youth programs. The main research question is: What are the administrative characteristics of police youth mentoring programs? The question is important to examine in order to identify how the programs can be effectively organized in order to improve the youth outcomes they intend to achieve. Specifically, we identify their main purposes, their youth services and characteristics, their organizational structures, and their funding mechanisms. We use the police youth programs run by 59 cities/ counties in the State of Florida as the empirical base. We analyzed the activities of their youth programs. Our preliminary findings show that the youth programs have a range of different purposes, such as decreasing juvenile crime rates, preventing gang involvement, drug education, recruiting youth to police departments, and promoting trust with youths. Accordingly, the youth services and characteristics also vary: juvenile delinquents referred to by other social services/ juvenile units, gang members, school kids, and athletes. From an administrative perspective, the youth programs are organized in three ways: as a sub-unit within the police department, an independent nonprofit loosely connected with the department, and voluntary programs organized by the police officers themselves. Funding Wise, the departmental programs are funded through allocations meant for the specific programs; nonprofits are partly through allocations and partly through fees and other voluntary fundraisings; voluntary programs depend on local, regional, or national fundraising means. The departmental programs organized as a sub-unit and funded through departmental allocation appear to be the most stable, with a credible commitment of the police departments to the youth programs; however, they are more bureaucratic in their functioning. The nonprofit and voluntary programs depend to a large extent on fundraising methods, but they interact with the community intensively and have more flexible activities and programs.