Shootings can have lasting effects on youth. What’s being done to help in Mecklenburg?

EDITOR’S NOTE: This reporting is part of ongoing Charlotte Observer coverage about gun violence, its impact on families and communities and relevant public policy.

When a child witnesses a shooting or other violence, it can take a toll. But providing support as soon as possible reduces the chances of that child experiencing long-term trauma.

In Mecklenburg County, when children are exposed to violence, the Child Development Community Policing program aims to connect families with services as soon as possible. The program started in Charlotte decades ago and is now expanding to help children and families in Pineville.

Pineville police chief Mike Hudgins said it would’ve been useful to have this partnership in 2021, when a 9-year-old died after being hit by a vehicle. Crisis teams and chaplains were deployed to help the family, but Hudgins indicated a need for tailored support to the boy’s siblings who witnessed the incident.

It’s not just families that need support.

“There’s folks out there that had nothing to do with an incident or the victims that are traumatized,” Hudgins said. “If we want to make a real big impact, we have to deal with that trauma, otherwise it could perpetuate itself.”

How trauma affects youth

There’s evidence that being exposed to trauma at an earlier age can have a greater impact on long-term development, said Adam Miller, a developmental psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and RTI International.

Two main models aim to explain the effect of trauma on youth, Miller said. The adverse childhood experiences model says that the more adverse events a child is exposed to, the more likely they are to have poor mental health later in life. Adverse events could include anything from parental divorce to gun violence.

Another, the dimensional model of adversity and psychopathology, tries to break down why certain events impact child development. That model focuses on neglectful and threatening experiences.

Threatening experiences change how children respond to their environment, and it’s harder for them to identify threats later on, Miller said.

“We have a natural inborn system to help us start associating specific cues with danger,” Miller said. “But kids who are in highly threatening environments, their learning process starts to become overused and it overgeneralizes to other things that may not be true cues of risk or harm.”

Not everyone is impacted by trauma in the same way.

Trauma isn’t just about the event, but also how that event is experienced, said Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling, a clinical psychologist at UNC Charlotte. The severity of the event, as well as how the person feels about why the event occurred or whether it might happen again, can contribute to the level of trauma they have.

“Were they in a vulnerable state when it happened? Did it wake them up in the middle of the night when they thought they were safe, or did the gun violence pierce the window of their house which they thought was their safe haven?” Langhinrichsen-Rohling said. “All of those are factors in the impact of the event over time.”

Youth at risk

CDCP director Stacey Butler said gun violence spreads like a virus — knowing someone that’s been impacted increases the chances of being personally impacted.

“If your child is in a social circle with another child who has been a victim or perpetrator of gun violence, then you know your child is at greater risk,” she said.

Even if someone has no connection to any of the people involved in a traumatic incident, it can still negatively affect them, Butler said. That makes it harder to identify who’s at risk and in need of services.

“We don’t always know who’s been impacted by violence and have something to offer them. Often, people have to suffer and struggle for years before they come to the attention of mental health professionals,” Butler said.

Last year, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police reported that nearly 500 people under the age of 18 had been victims of gun-related crime. That number includes youth that had a gun pointed at them regardless of whether they were injured.

On the flip side, more than 100 minors have been suspects in gun crimes since the beginning of 2022, CMPD said.

Research has suggested that young people carry guns to “establish dominance” or facilitate other illegal activities, or because their friends or family members carry guns.

But research has also found that being shot or seeing someone else get shot can lead young people to start carrying guns for protection. This means that leaving fears about violence unaddressed could potentially lead to more shootings.

Butler emphasized that police cannot address the impact of shootings alone and that Mecklenburg needs a “holistic system” to help those affected.

How the program works

The CDCP is inspired by a similar partnership that started in Connecticut between the Yale Child Study Center and the New Haven Police Department in 1991.

Butler was one of the first full-time mental health clinicians hired to support the program. She oversaw the program’s expansion to Mecklenburg’s southern municipalities: Pineville, Matthews and Mint Hill.

“We approached Pineville about that opportunity once we were able to go back into police cars and direct service work post-COVID and Pineville was on board, so we were very lucky and excited about that,” Butler said.

Hudgins said officers received an eight-hour training on the CDCP. That training focuses on child development, the impact of trauma on children and effective partnerships between police and clinicians. It also focuses on identifying police interventions that are most helpful for families that have been impacted by trauma.

Police refer families to the program if they believe a child needs support after a sudden event. Then, one of 17 mental health clinicians will visit the home with police to see what the family needs.

A third of referrals involved families with at least one child younger than six. In June 2022, the CDCP was involved in a case where a 1-year-old was fatally shot and a 7-year-old was injured.

The goal of the CDCP is to provide short-term support to youth to prevent them from needing longer-term services in the future.

“We’re assessing for those earliest emerging trauma symptoms, indicators that our clinicians can pick up on within minutes or hours of an incident, and we’re applying interventions immediately in tandem with our officer partners who are talking with families about what they need to not just feel safe, but be safe,” Butler said.