The Law & Your Community

The Law & Your Community is a nationally recognized hands-on interactive training program for young people ages 13-18 designed to improve their communications with law enforcement officers and their understanding of their federal, state and local laws.

Components of the Program:

The primary purpose of this module is to provide a short but insightful education of how our representative democracy works and the role that citizens play in this system. Emphasis is placed on the power that citizens have to affect the direction of their government by being active participants in the electoral process. Another purpose of the module is to show you why and how laws are made at the local, state, and national levels. A third purpose of the lesson is to stress the importance of laws and their purpose in maintaining the health and welfare of society as well as peace and order.

The primary purpose is to increase participants’ knowledge base regarding common crimes that teens and young adults often find themselves charged with. A secondary purpose of the lesson is to influence decision-making such that participants will avoid purposely or inadvertently engaging in criminal activity. The final purpose of the lesson is to help participants analyze, evaluate, and correct behavior that may lead to entanglement into the criminal justice system.

The purpose is to educate participants on the proper ways to respond during encounters with law enforcement and how to handle police misconduct— during, and after, the time the misconduct takes place. Secondly, we will explore what Community Policing is and is not. Lastly, we will discuss the realities of working in Law Enforcement.

How it Came to Be

The first Law and Your Community was in St. Luis, Missouri in 2014. The forerunner to The Law and Your Community was called The Law and You, created through a collaboration between NOBLE and Allstate Insurance Company. The program teaches youth how to interact safely with law enforcement during police encounters.