In Brief:
- Young people think and act differently than adults. They may be more easily intimidated by officers and not know their rights or how processes work. And experts say youth who seem like they’re deliberately defying officers may really just be scared, confused or dealing with a disability.
- The Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commission released a first draft of what will eventually become new regulations governing how officers interact with youth.
- A national policy and training organization focused on youth-police interactions praised the draft, while recommending revising it to cover more scenarios. A police chiefs organization said the draft has worthy goals but oversteps, and that parts are confusing or tricky to implement.
Massachusetts is taking a new look at how police officers should treat minors.
In 2020, the commonwealth created an independent agency charged, in part, with creating minimum certification standards for law enforcement agencies. One element of those standards is how law enforcement should interact with juveniles. In late June 2025, the entity — the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission (POST Commission) — released a first look at its thinking on this topic.
The draft standards were met with acclaim from Strategies for Youth, a national policy and training organization that focuses on youth-law enforcement interactions.
The draft standards will be translated into draft regulations likely in a few months, at which point the commissioners will vote on whether the regulations are ready to be presented for public comment, says POST Executive Director Enrique Zuniga.
“We're really pleased to see this first-in-the-nation, first-of-its-kind Juvenile Operations Standard in a POST in the U.S.,” says Lisa Thurau, executive director of Strategies for Youth, which advocates for law enforcement to recognize that youth are developmentally different than adults and treat them accordingly.
The group’s proposals helped inform the draft standards. “It’s really got a lot of the key pieces we want,” Thurau says.
A major law enforcement group has been more wary, praising the aims of the draft standards while asking for parts to be reined in. Chief Michael J. Bradley Jr. (Ret.), the executive director of the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association, says in a letter that the Commission exceeded its scope. While “many elements of the draft standard align with best practices already in place across numerous police departments,” Bradley says, other expectations are hard to implement or too vague or open-ended for officers to know how to follow.
“These prescriptive mandates exceed the concept of minimum standards and encroach upon areas traditionally governed by municipal chiefs, town policy, and collective bargaining processes,” Bradley writes in a letter to the Commission. “The draft regulation imposes significant new mandates that will be difficult to meet for many law enforcement agencies, particularly those in smaller municipalities or with limited personnel.”
The draft standards come at a time when the commonwealth is increasingly holding youth in custody. That uptick is driven in part by officers in the state more often responding to misdemeanors with arrests.
Eventually, the draft standards will be finalized into new regulations. At that point, law enforcement agencies will need to adopt new policies to comply with them and officers will need to undergo new training.
Adopting new rules for youth-police interactions will also set Massachusetts apart.
Many jurisdictions around the U.S. have few youth-specific policies, outside of certain federal rules, and officers often don’t get many hours of training specifically about handling this age group, Thurau says.
But youth are very different from adults. There’s greater power disparity between officers and youth, plus, teens’ brains are still developing. Serious mental health issues also tend to start manifesting during adolescence, Thurau says. Officers, in part, need training to be able to distinguish between youth behavior that’s criminal and behavior that’s just irritating or strange, she says.
Young people also may be likelier not to understand what’s happening in an interaction with a law enforcement officer, given their lack of life experience, the POST standard notes. And youth can be more easily intimidated or coerced than adults can. All this makes it important for officers to modify their approach when engaging with teens and children.
The draft standards say officers should be aware of youth’s developmental differences and the impact of an officer’s own presence, and of youth’s inexperience with legal happenings. To compensate for the latter, officers should explain what they’re doing and why, and tell minors their rights as well as how to file complaints or raise concerns. A draft presentation also calls for using tactics and techniques that are “developmentally and age appropriate; trauma informed; racially equitable; culturally relevant; and not intimidating, coercive and/or threatening.”
Massachusetts’ youth arrests aren’t felt equally: Black youth are five times more likely to be arrested than white peers, while Latino youth are three times more likely, per the draft.
Taking a more culturally relevant approach includes having officers recognize not just the impact of a civilian’s age, but also other factors — like if a person may not be complying with instructions because they don’t understand English well or because they’re terrified and do not trust the police, says POST Executive Director Zuniga.
Tailored for Youth
The POST Commission’s new draft standard is wide-ranging, addressing matters like arresting youth, transporting them and holding them in temporary custody, as well as searching their homes and arresting their caregivers.
The new standards call for agencies to create processes for receiving complaints, create annual reports analyzing trends in policing youth and ensure officers get the training needed to comply with the new juvenile operations approaches.
Some of the draft standards speak to practicalities — for example, requiring law enforcement agencies to create policies for letting parents know where officers are taking their children, when officers transport youths somewhere.
Other parts of the standard speak to goals but leave more room for interpretation. For example, saying that officers “should take the least intrusive and most effective action available in order to minimize any harms that may flow from a youth’s over-involvement with policing and the criminal justice system.”
Language like this is a point of concern for Bradley, who worries that without clear definitions of things like “the least intrusive and most effective” action, officers could get in trouble for their interpretations of the requirements. That’s also a topic the POST Commission has been discussing with the Municipal Police Training Committee, which sets minimum training standards for municipal police, and which prefers tightly defined rules, says POST Executive Director Zuniga. But Zuniga believes a level of fluidity is important in the standards, because they need to be applicable for all the many different situations an officer could encounter.
In his letter, Bradley asks for practical definitions and interpretive examples to help agencies avoid misinterpretations, and for model policies to ease the administrative burden on agencies that have to craft new policy documents.
Bradley is also particularly concerned with a measure that says youth should be transported with “at least one officer whose gender identity matches the youth’s gender identity.” That kind of operational detail is outside the POST Commission’s scope, Bradley says, and could be difficult for agencies with small staffing to achieve.
Meanwhile, Shelley Jackson, Strategies for Youth’s law enforcement policies attorney, sees ways the standards should go further. For example, explicitly addressing the need for officers to recognize that seeming disobedience or defiance on the part of youth may actually be due to an underlying disability or mental health crisis. (While the draft standards address the need for developmentally appropriate, trauma-informed response, they don’t specifically mention disabilities.) Jackson also advised updating language on sexual relationships to forbid them between officers and 16- or 17-year-olds, given the underlying power disparities.
And Jackson recommended adding in guidance on how officers interact with youth during investigatory stops, in which they approach a young person, ask questions and may or may not end up arresting them.
“There's a lot that can happen in that interaction,” Jackson says. “There's a lot of research that even if a youth is not arrested or later taken into custody, that what happens in that investigatory stop and those questions on the street can really have an impact.”
