Local police departments have joined up with other departments around the state in two initiatives designed to involve parents in combating teen drinking and teen fatalities in traffic accidents.
One will provide a way for police to enter homes to break up parties, and the other will have police officers calling parents when teen drivers break the law.
Each year, South Portland police officers break up anywhere from six to 12 big parties where teenagers are consuming alcohol, according to Police Chief Edward Googins. “These are the ones that get out of hand, a dozen, 20, 30 kids,” Googins said. “The big ones.”
The Key Program is a new program in South Portland designed to curb the number of these house parties the police are forced to break up. The program allows parents to register their homes with the police when they are heading out of town, but leaving behind the kids. Police will do property checks during the homeowners’ absence, which is not a new idea.
Googins said residents going on vacation have always been able to register their homes for property checks. But what is different about the Key Program is that included in the registration the parents must “provide a contact person or, hence the name, a person with a key,” Googins said.
That way, if the police check on a home registered in the Key Program and find a house party going on or anything out of the ordinary they have someone nearby to call who has a key to the house and can give police permission to enter the home if there is a need.
Googins said the department has never had a mechanism in place to respond to a registered home when a teenager is remaining at home. Googins said an officer brought the idea for the program back from a conference.
Cape Elizabeth Police Chief Neil Williams said his department has something similar. Parents have always been able to register their home in Cape Elizabeth for property checks when they go away and leave a teenager. And parents have always been encouraged to include a phone number where they can be reached or a local contact person in case police need to enter the home to access a party or another disturbance arises.
Williams said just registering a home for property checks discourages parties. Parents are encouraged to post the letter to the police department registering the home for property checks in full view. “There’s a lot of peer pressure and this gives the juvenile an out,” Williams said.
Googins agreed. “It gives the youth the ability to use (the Key Program) as leverage so these things don’t become out of hand.”
Andy Strout, a physical education teacher at Cape Elizabeth Middle School and founder of Cape Life – a program in the high school that brings together students who have pledged to be substance free – said most parents don’t have a clue about what kind of dangerous activities their kids are participating in.
According to a 2002 study by the Maine Office of Substance Abuse on alcohol use and abuse by adolescents in grades eight through 12, 99 percent of parents surveyed said their child had not been drinking in excess (five or more drinks in a row) within the past two weeks. However, 20 percent of the children surveyed said they had drunk to excess within the past two weeks.
“The denial is unbelievable,” Strout said. “Parents have no idea what their kids are doing.”
Another initiative, this one on the state level, is designed to encourage parents to take a larger role in the promotion of safe driving habits for their teenage drivers.
SAFEGuard is a program initiated by the Maine State Police, the Maine Chiefs of Police Association and the Maine Sheriffs Association. It is designed to improve communication between police and parents when dealing with young drivers found to be engaging in unsafe or high-risk behavior behind the wheel, such as speeding, failing to use seat belts, aggressive driving and the use of drugs or alcohol.
“I think parents are often the last to know and not aware of what their children are doing,” said Sgt. John O’Malley of the Scarborough Police Department. SAFEGuard encourages police officers to contact parents whenever a young driver is observed or warned about dangerous habits behind the wheel.
Contacting parents about their children’s dangerous behavior is not a new concept, but it has been inconsistent and uncoordinated.
However, Williams and O’Malley said the intitiative wouldn’t change much in their communities because Cape Elizabeth and Scarborough have already stressed involving parents when these sorts of issues arise.
“This is not going to be a huge change in Scarborough,” O’Malley said. “Most of our officers have children and operate under the premise that they’d like to know.”
Williams said the Cape police have always tried to involve parents as much as possible, especially when drugs and alcohol are involved. So, implementing a program like SAFEGuard in Cape Elizabeth will not change how the department deals with teenagers and parents.
Williams said not every teenager issued a speeding ticket will get a call to their parents, but the police will determine when a call goes out to parents on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the level of severity and other factors such as if the driver was operating under a conditional license.
Googins said officers in South Portland will be encouraged to make phone calls when they might not have before. He also said South Portland already has a similar program in place, though not a very popular one. It’s called “How’s my driving?” The program asks parents to place a bumper sticker on their car that provides a phone number and asks people to report the drivers actions.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, traffic accidents are the number one killer of teenagers in America, and nearly one-third of those involve underage drinking. While young drivers between the ages of 15 and 20 years old account for less than 7 percent of America’s licensed drivers, they represent just over 20 percent of the nation’s annual traffic accident fatalities. So far in Maine this year (as of July 11), 11 teenage drivers have been involved in fatal crashes, resulting in 12 deaths.
O’Malley said if SAFEGuard can prevent just one of those accidents from happening, “it’s worth that one phone call.”
While the purpose of SAFEGuard is to promote the early intervention of parents into the dangerous driving habits of their teenagers, parents have the opportunity to affect those habits much earlier.
According to Students Against Destructive Decisions, almost 60 percent of high school students in this country say their parents are the biggest influence on their driving and 69 percent of middle school students say their parents will be the biggest influence when they do drive.
Strout said it makes sense that the majority of teenagers say their parents are the biggest influence on their driving. “Life now is so much in a hurry,” he said. “As kids grow up they see the stress their parents are under … they watch the way their parents rush everywhere.”
O’Malley said that a lot of parents aren’t aware how much their behavior and actions affects their children.
“Perhaps (SAFEGuard) will be a double-edged sword,” O’Malley said. If a phone call to a parent begins a dialogue with their children about dangerous driving habits, maybe they will realize their own driving habits are less than perfect.
“If parents realize their children are sponges they may change their own behavior,” O’Malley said.
Strout said these sort of initiatives only work if parents get involved. “Parents are the biggest key,” he said.
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