GETTING THE BALANCE RIGHT: THE POLICING OF YOUNG PEOPLE IN

This paper serves to draw together current information about the policing of youth in New South Wales. This is a considerable task, given the internal reforms of the New South Wales Police Service and the legislative developments in recent years. Due to the brevity of this paper, only a limited number of issues will be covered. References will be made to other recently published articles, which provide more extensive discussion of some of these issues. Specifically, this paper will deal with the following: 1. The complexity and breadth of police-youth relations across the state; 2. The public perceptions of juvenile crime and the relationship between these perceptions and the policing of youth; 3. The relationship between divergent evaluative paradigms in assessing the quality of police-youth relations, with reference to the Crimes Legislation Amendment (Police an