The Usual, Racialized, Suspects: The Consequence of Police Contacts with Black and White Youth on Adult Arrest

Abstract

Research on race and policing indicates that Black Americans experience a greater frequency of police contacts, discretionary stops, and police harassment when stops occur. Yet, studies examining the long-term consequences of police contact with young people have not examined whether criminal justice consequences of police contact differ by race. We address this issue by examining whether police encounters with children and adolescents predict arrest in young adulthood and if these effects are the same for Black and White individuals. The paper uses longitudinal survey data from 331 Black and White respondents enrolled in the Seattle Public School District as eighth graders in 2001 and 2002. Our findings indicate that police encounters in childhood increase the risk of arrest in young adulthood for Black but not White respondents. Black respondents who experience contact with the police by the eighth grade have eleven times greater odds of being arrested when they are 20 years old than their White counterparts.

Race and Ethnicity Differences in Police Contact and Perceptions of and Attitudes Toward the Police Among Youth

“…As youth are in a malleable stage of life, experiences with police officers can be remarkably formative. As such, the type of police encounter, whether direct or vicarious (knowing someone who has been stopped by the police) can have detrimental consequences for youth, such as posttraumatic stress (Gearhart et al, 2021), worse self-reported health (McFarland et al, 2019), increased legal cynicism (Geller & Fagan, 2019), and later arrests (McGlynn-Wright et al, 2020). Moreover, encounters with police can significantly affect youth respect and confidence in law enforcement (Brick et al, 2009; Harris & Jones, 2020; Hurst, 2007; Sanden & Wentz, 2017); and insights from procedural justice research indicates that how youth are treated during a police stop can significantly influence their perceptions of and attitudes toward police (Friedman et al, 2014; Harris & Jones, 2020).…”

From School Halls to Shopping Malls: Multilevel Predictors of Police Contact In and Out of School

“…At the bivariate level, Black youth in our sample are overrepresented in police contacts both in and outside of school and are more likely to receive school punishment, but we no longer find significant differences by race after controlling for other individual-and school-level factors. Although we expected to see race differences in police contact based on theory and prior research (e.g., Ferguson 2000;Fisher, Wiley, and McGlynn-Wright 2021;McGlynn-Wright et al 2020;Rios 2011;Shedd 2015), our results parallel studies that find race is no longer significant once other correlates of police contact are accounted for, particularly prior school punishment (Crutchfield et al 2009(Crutchfield et al , 2012. Black youth in our sample were more likely to have prior school punishment, police contact, and friends who have been in trouble with the police, so we cannot cleanly separate race from secondary sanctioning or peer associations that might affect later experiences with the police.…”

Controlling Schools: How School Resource Officers’ Roles Map Onto Schools’ Behavior Management Strategies

“…However, doing so may facilitate the school to prison pipeline (Owens, 2017). Even if the interactions do not culminate in arrest, police contact among youth can lead to harmful trajectories (Wiley et al, 2013), particularly among Black youth (McGlynn-Wright et al, 2020). Alternatively, counselors and mentors are capable of helping students but are unable to arrest them and may not bring the same negative consequences.…”