Abstract
Youth experience increased surveillance by and involuntary contact with police officers compared with other age groups. Studies that explore the experiences of youth during these encounters are scant and focus on youth with criminal histories. This research aims to explore the experiences of college-attending youth between 18 and 24 years old in two southern states. The study was designed and conducted according to the tenets of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Twelve Black youth were recruited and interviewed between April 2015 and April 2016. Three superordinate themes (and subthemes) were identified: (1) negative feelings towards the police; (2) precarity of police encounters (subthemes: police as a threat to welfare; it could be me; steps to follow during police encounters; behavior is irrelevant) and; (3) police response is part of structural racism (subthemes: racism is everywhere; media contributes to racism). The importance of these findings for social work practice and research will be discussed.
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This study was funded by The University of Texas at Arlington’s Center for African American Studies.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.
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Nordberg, A., Twis, M.K., Stevens, M.A. et al. Precarity and structural racism in Black youth encounters with police. Child Adolesc Soc Work J 35, 511–518 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10560-018-0540-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10560-018-0540-x