alt.NPR: Youthcast from PRX

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rubbertoe/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

There are a few staid themes in youth reporting, and I’m sure I’ll feature pieces that touch on all of them in the next few months. They’re the DANGER topics, the ones that lend themselves to moralizing and giving adults a platform to tell teens what they should do: teen pregnancy, drugs and alcohol, gang violence, etc. Teenagers’ relationships with police officer figure greatly into the last two.  Quinn Andrews is a reporter at Y-Press in Indianapolis, Indiana and after meeting with a group of teens to get their opinions on how police treat them, he went and interviewed to officers, a rookie and a veteran, about how they perceive the Youth.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 8:37 — 3.9MB)

Check out that piece Quinn refers to in the interview, where Y-Press had a roundtable with young people about their opinions on police officers, here.

Do you have a story about a police officer being less than respectful to you, whether you are young or not-so-young? How about a story of an officer being helpful or friendly? (I remember this one guy pulling up to a light next to me and my friend and just asking, “How are you doing today?”)

When I think of police and teenagers though, I always think of this viral YouTube clip of a Baltimore police officer hassling some skateboarders. It is pretty riveting and upsetting, since it’s the textbook example of what a lot of people think of when theythink of bad cops. This officer may be a jerk, but that boy he shoves around? His family is suing him for $6 million. Who’s overreacting now? They go to trial in October.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.