In this series, five Y-Press journalists explore the relationships between minority youth and the police in the Indianapolis area. Over the last several months, the team interviewed teens involved with 100 Black Men, the Latino Collective and teens participating in the four-year-old Our Kids (OK) program. In addition, local police officers told of us about the issue from their vantage point.

After reporting from the Democratic Convention in Denver, we realized teens there can be more independent than us. We used the bus system in the center of the city. There are more than 100 bus routes, compared to 28 in Indianapolis. To us, it seems like it should be the other way around, considering that the urban population of Indianapolis is 200,000 more than Denver’s.

Considering how important young people have been to this election cycle, it's not surprising that their journalistic peers have the same enthusiasm for covering it.

Do Latinos vote as a bloc? According to students at Duarte High School in Los Angeles County, the answer is sometimes.

Pollsters and analysts love to identify voting blocs, using them to explain voting trends and to make projections. The Latino voting bloc has been repeatedly analyzed, often getting credit for swaying elections, such as the 2004 presidential contest in which incumbent George W. Bush defeated U.S. Sen. John Kerry.

Rachel Briggs is a youth volunteer for the Obama campaign in Honolulu, HI. Organizing supporters’ contact information, working at fund-raising events, and starting a student chapter in her district are some of Rachel’s accomplishments.

Megan Waggoner’s first love is the environment. She is active in Alaska Youth for Environmental Action and traveled to Washington, D.C., last year to attend the President’s Environmental Youth Awards ceremony, which recognized her group for its environmental activism.

As a college student, Eboo Patel was dismayed as he looked around the world and saw young people of different faiths fighting and killing each other. He was saddened that so few young people attended international conferences that brought together people of various faiths to talk about peace. Patel and other like-minded young adults founded the Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core in 1998. Patel, 3