Timing Matters: How Adolescent Police Contact Shapes Political Lives

The State You See

“…That police often serve as the "first experience" with government for people of color, as exemplified by the quote from Coach Y that opened this chapter, suggests that the CLS plays a particularly strong role in shaping people of color's feelings about what government is and does. Indeed, recent research shows that police stops that occur during people's early adolescence have a larger impact on their level of trust in government in adulthood (Farhart and Rosenthal 2018). Put in the language of my theoretical framework, that CLS interactions so often take place in one's adolescence for people of color makes the CLS a more likely location of the state among this population.…”