Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Recent high-profile incidents of police violence and misconduct have brought widespread attention to long-standing tensions between police departments and the communities they serve. Policy shifts over the past 20 years have led to the broad adoption of “proactive” policing, which emphasizes active engagement of citizens at low levels of suspicion. Police use investigative stops, citations, and arrests to detect and disrupt low-level disorder or other circumstances interpreted as indicia that crime is afoot. However, these encounters rarely uncover illegal activity, and in many cities are characterized by stark racial disparities. Such encounters threaten the health and wellbeing of individuals and communities targeted.

Although racial disparities in police contact are increasingly documented in police department data, much remains to be learned about the relationship between police and American teens. Administrative statistics indicate that police stops of adolescents are widespread. Police officers are also ubiquitous in urban schools. However, little is known about the experiences of youth stopped by the police. Administrative data are generally deidentified and cannot identify the experience of repeated police encounters. Survey and interview data focus on older populations, teens who came of age before the proactive policing era, or adolescents within a single city. The current national picture of policing and its implications for youth is unclear.

We use new data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Survey (FFCWS) to measure the extent, nature, and health implications of police contact among a cohort of contemporary urban teenagers. The FFCWS is a population-based survey of urban families, which follows a cohort of more than 3,000 children, born in 20 large cities, over the first fifteen years of their lives. The study includes a systematic oversample of children born to unmarried parents, providing a sample that is socioeconomically disadvantaged and has high proportions of black and Hispanic families (but can be weighted to represent urban births more generally).

Preliminary analyses indicate that FFCWS teens have extensive police exposure: more than 75% report a police officer stationed at their school, and more than 25% report personal experience with the police. More than 75% report “vicarious contact”, in which the teen witnessed a police stop or heard about a stop from someone they know. This contact is racially disparate, and often severe (more than 40% of those stopped report having been frisked or searched, and nearly 20% report that the police threatened or used physical force). More than half of teens stopped report being stopped multiple times.

We hypothesize that police contact is a source of both acute and chronic stress, threatening adolescent health and social equity. We test this using a mix of longitudinal regression and propensity score models to identify determinants of adolescent-police contact (including delinquent behavior and demographic and socioeconomic background characteristics), and estimate the implications of this contact for adolescent anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. We anticipate statistically and substantively significant relationships between police contact and adolescent health, suggesting that aggressive police contact imposes severe costs that must be weighed against any accompanying public safety benefit.