Measuring trans youths’ perceptions of police and police bias: Exploring the use of the perceptions of police scale.

Abstract

Recently there have been record-breaking increases in policies prohibiting, and even some proposals to criminalize, normative behavior of gender-diverse youth. These policies inherently expand law enforcement’s surveillance of trans and gender-expansive youth. Despite this, we know very little about how trans and gender-expansive youth perceive the police, or how they believe the police perceive them, which are important factors that may influence police–youth interactions. Therefore, the present study investigated trans and gender-expansive youths’ perceptions of police and police bias by first evaluating the Perceptions of Police Scale’s (POPS; Nadal & Davidoff, 2015) construct validity. Additionally, researchers proposed the Perceived Police Perceptions (PPP) scale adapted from the POPS to capture gender-diverse youths’ beliefs about how police perceive transgender communities. Using data collected through social media, trans and gender-expansive youth (n = 480) completed the POPS and PPP. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the POPS’ acceptable model and evidenced the measure’s construct validity, while exploratory factor analysis confirmed the factor structure of the PPP. Together, the POPS and PPP were found to be promising measures of trans and gender-expansive youths’ perceptions. Further analyses suggested that older trans and gender-expansive youth view the police more negatively than younger youth suggesting perceptions may be formed during adolescence. We discuss the important implications for police–youth interactions and propose directions for future research.