Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Aggressive policing is increasingly recognized as a driver of social inequality and individual challenges that might undermine adolescents’ school engagement, achievement, and attainment. One potential explanation for these links is that police contact influences student absenteeism. Absenteeism is an acknowledged driver of academic success because it has direct causal effects on student achievement (Goodman, 2014; Gershenson et al., 2017; Aucejo & Romano, 2014), and is strongly associated with higher risks of dropping out of school (Balfanz & Byrnes, 2012). Additionally, rates of chronic absenteeism are part of school accountability plans for 36 states under the Every Student Succeeds Act, making a reduction in absenteeism a critical policy goal.

Aggressive policing poses several challenges to student attendance. Police stops, particularly aggressive ones, may function as a stressor that undermines physical and mental health. Police contact may also carry or trigger stigma, particularly for those who perceive that they were stopped due to race or another aspect of their identity. Police contact may also undermine student engagement; aggressive or unjustified police stops have been linked to legal cynicism and estrangement, which may extend to system-avoidant behaviors such as truancy. Recent research has established links between surges in police stops and educational challenges among Black students in NYC (Legewie & Fagan, 2019), between increased immigration enforcement and absenteeism among children in immigrant families (Sattin-Bajaj & Kirksey, 2019), and between police in schools and out of school suspension rates (Weisburts, 2019). However, research to date has been unable to determine whether this relationship holds at the individual level or in nationally representative data.

We test the relationship between police contact and school absenteeism using the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a population-based birth cohort study of families with children born between 1998 and 2000 in 20 large U.S. cities. The study oversampled nonmarital births, providing a sample of socioeconomically disadvantaged families that could be weighted to represent urban births nationally. Families were interviewed shortly after the “focal child’s” birth, and contacted for follow-up when the focal child was 1, 3, 5, 9 and 15 years old. The focal children were personally interviewed at years 9 and 15.

We measure several aspects of school absenteeism including: truancy, days missed due to health, suspension, and whether the parent and teacher spoke about the focal child’s attendance (suggesting a problem of chronic absences). We also measure several dimensions of the focal teens’ police contact: whether they had a police officer stationed at their school, whether they had ever been stopped (at school or elsewhere, and at what ages), and intrusion of their most memorable encounter. Preliminary analyses indicate that police contact is common among urban teens, unequally distributed by race and sex, and likely to compromise school attendance.

We hypothesize that associations between adolescents’ police experiences and school absences are statistically significant and robust to controls for the teens’ development, behavior, family background and early school achievement, as well as observable aspects of family instability. Future analyses will examine these relationships in a longitudinal regression framework.