What to do if your teenager is arrested
Teenagers that are out of control will inevitably at some stage come to the attention of the law. Even the best behaved adolescent, if in the wrong place at the wrong time, may end up being arrested and parents will get the phone call telling them to come down to the station. If your teen is a minor, they cannot be interviewed without their parents, or a responsible adult, present at the time of the interview.
If this is the first time they have been arrested the police are likely to be more accommodating and, depending on the charge, will call parents even of teenagers who are not minors. The natural parental reaction to a teenager being arrested is shame, embarrassment and horror. If the parent is focused on how their teens arrest will look to other people, the teenager is immediately going to believe that, in their parents' eyes, they are less important than their parents' reputation. However ashamed the parents are, they must focus on the teens behavior and how it affects the teenager. The police officers are allies in this situation, up to a point; they can yell at the teenager and make them feel terrible, so the parent does not need to add to this.
The parents must ensure that the teenager knows their rights and has access to a lawyer if they need one. It is up to parents how they deal with this, a lesson for the teenager, that is not a minor, would be to let them sort out their own lawyer, accept the court appointed legal service for example, when the crime is fairly minor. This could teach them a valuable lesson about taking responsibility for their own actions.
Whether parents leave their teenager in jail overnight is a matter of safety; if the jail is safe, an overnight stay may teach them another lesson, if the police station is in a bad neighborhood, get the teenager out and home, but then confined to their room. The most important issue in this situation is that the teenager realizes that their arrest is their responsibility, not something that their parents are going to fix for them.
The temptation to take over and sort this out for the teenager is very strong, but the teen will learn nothing from that approach. If they are fined and do not have the money to pay the fine, the parents may have to pay it, but the teen will have to work off this debt and reimburse their parents. If the teen truly takes responsibility for being arrested, it may be the wake-up call the defiant teen needed and their behavior may change as a result. If the arrest seems to be another notch in the belt of bad but "cool" behavior and raises the teens standing in their group, the parents may need to seriously think about sending their teen on a behavior modification program or the criminal behavior may well escalate.