Source: (2000) Gazette. 62(5/6): 31-33.
The article describes the Hamilton-Wentworth Regional Police (HWRP) Strategic Offenders Program (STOP). The program tracks young people at “high risk to re-offend.” Intervention aims to prevent re-offending but, when that fails, enforcement is used to safeguard the community. The HWRP program sees prevention and education as essential partners to enforcement, a continual system of youth being involved in positive encounters with the law enforcement community. Within HWRP are three groups of officers primarily involved in working with youth: (1) Community Service Officers, normally the first point of police contact for the very young; (2) School Liaison Officers fully dedicated to the schools they serve, visiting them frequently, always in uniform; and (3) Divisional Youth Officers, who receive youth-related reports from the other two groups as well as from a number of other sources. The Divisional Youth Officers are the center of knowledge of youth crime for their area. They are placed to identify the 5 percent of high-risk youth involved in criminal activity and the list they generate is the basis for the STOP program.
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