The Youth-Community Oriented Policing Effort (Y-COPE) Program is a collaborative effort between Alternatives, Inc. and the Hampton Police Division designed for the purpose of developing and implementing a curriculum that will help prepare police in their community policing efforts while engaging young people in neighborhood problem solving.

Mission

• Fosters cooperation and collaboration between police and adolescents working together to find solutions to problems created by youth violence.
• Implement a curriculum designed to instruct police personnel on how to interact successfully with the City's youth.
• Explore and expel typical stereotypes and attitudes that serve as barriers to cooperative interaction between the police and youth in the community.

Y-COPE seeks to explore the stereotypes and attitudes that are barriers to cooperative interaction between the police and young people, while at the same time exploring the benefits of resourcing young people in the Division's community policing effort.  In the Spring of 1996, a group of police officers and young people together designed a curriculum to instruct police personnel on how to better interact with adolescents while concentrating on their community policing efforts.  The program utilizes three bodies of research, resiliency, risk and protective factors, and youth development, to identify and assess the issues that face today's youth.  These in turn have become the basis for guiding the direction of this program. Y-COPE serves as a prevention project by bringing police together with the young people in Hampton to work toward finding solutions to area problems created by violence, maintaining the Division's continual commitment to reducing juvenile crime rates.

For more information, please email chiefsoffice@hampton.gov or call (757) 727-6510.