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Timing Matters: How Adolescent Police Contact Shapes Political Lives

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Abstract

Aggressive policing policies and practices have led to frequent interactions between the police and America’s youth, particularly for young people of color. Research has demonstrated the negative effect of adolescent police contact on economic, educational, and health outcomes, yet we lack a systematic account of how these interactions shape American democracy and political engagement. To address this issue, we bring together theories from policy feedback and political socialization to argue that experiences with government will be more politically impactful when they take place during one’s youth. We test this framework using two nationally representative longitudinal datasets, finding that police contact has a greater impact on political interest and political trust in adulthood when that contact first takes place during early adolescence. This analysis underscores the importance of changing the relationship between the police and America’s youth by revealing the political power of preadult experiences with the state.

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Notes

  1. Following the example of other scholars (e.g. Terwiel, 2020), we use the term “criminal legal system” in place of the more commonly used “criminal justice system” to unsettle the assumption that the current system provides justice. In the remainder of the manuscript, we use CLS as an acronym when referring to the criminal legal system. Notably, our analysis here is largely focused on policing, so we only refer to the CLS in those instances where we are implicating the whole of the vast and decentralized system, including actors and institutions beyond the police (e.g. prisons, jails, courts, etc.).

  2. Though as Barnes and Hope (2017) show, young people’s political behavior may be shaped by their parents’ policy experiences. Tied to policing, this finding suggests that preadult political attitudes and actions could be influenced by proximal contact with the CLS, such as having an incarcerated parent, a hypothesis that has received some empirical support (Lee et al., 2014).

  3. Work from Hannah Walker and colleagues (Walker, 2020; Walker & García-Castañon, 2017) is a notable exception to this trend, providing strong evidence of pathways through which experiences with CLS actors can lead to increased participation. That this mobilization tends to take place outside of the electoral arena suggests an important limitation to the analysis we offer here, which is more focused on electoral politics. We discuss this limitation in greater detail in the concluding section.

  4. Replication data and code are available on the Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/BHVINR.

  5. The Cronbach’s alpha for the three items is .93.

  6. There are no direct questions about the parent’s voting behavior, so we use these group membership variables as proxies for parental political engagement.

  7. Urbanization is measured with a dichotomous variable indicating if the neighborhood was “completely urban” or “not completely urban”. Racial composition is coded using a dichotomous variable that indicates if the modal racial group in one’s childhood neighborhood was Black or not.

  8. While these neighborhood and parental context variables are helpful, the data do not allow us to directly capture the level of police contact within one’s community or social network. This is an important missing element given findings from the extant literature that use theories of cultural transmission, direct observation, demobilization, resource deprivation, and social disorganization to suggest that these policing context variables are influential in shaping feedback effects (e.g. Burch, 2013; Lerman, 2013). Thus, we believe our neighborhood and parental control variables limit the potential that our age of first police contact variables are merely capturing one’s social environment, but our data do not allow us to completely rule out these alternative explanations.

  9. Table A1 in the supplemental appendix provides a detailed demographic breakdown of our samples, including the number of people falling into each cell for our age of first contact categories.

  10. As political interest uses a five-point scale, we also analyze it using ordinal logistic regression. The results are substantively identical under this specification, as seen in Table A2 in the supplemental appendix.

  11. Tables A3 and A4 in the supplemental appendix show that the pertinent results for the age of first contact variables remain substantively identical when the survey weights are removed.

  12. Finding that liberals are less politically trusting is likely driven by the timing of the Add Health survey. This survey took place not long after President George W. Bush’s controversial victory in the 2000 election and was in the field during September 11, 2001. Each of these events likely had an impact on inflating conservative trust in government and depressing trust among liberals (Anderson & LoTempio, 2002; Citrin, 1974; Hetherington, 2005; Hetherington & Rudolph, 2015).

  13. Again, because of the timing of these questions in the respondent’s lives, we cannot include a measure for people whose first police contact occurred after the age of 25. We discuss this limitation in greater detail in the conclusion.

  14. A potential explanation for the significance of the age variables is that they are actually just measuring frequency of contact. Table A5 in the supplemental appendix provides some support for this notion, showing that those first stopped in adolescence are likely to be stopped more frequently, as compared to those first stopped in young adulthood. However, this relationship holds for those stopped before the age of 15 and those stopped between 15 and 18, suggesting that this increased frequency is not unique to those stopped in early adolescence. In addition, Table A6 shows that the interaction between number of times stopped and being stopped in early adolescence is not significant in relation to political trust and political interest, indicating that the impact of the age of first contact is not contingent on how often one is stopped after that. Taken together, these results suggest that the findings presented here are capturing the effect of the age of first police contact and not the frequency of that contact.

  15. While we are clearly focused on policing in this paper, we do hope scholars will consider how age of contact with other government programs may shape policy feedback effects. To ensure that our results really were capturing the impact of police stops and not other policies that have been shown to alter political behavior, we ran models controlling for the childhood and adult receipt of direct-cash assistance (often referred to as welfare) (Bruch et al., 2010; Soss, 1999). These results can be seen in Table A7 in the supplemental appendix and show that the impact of our age of police contact variables remain identical under this specification.

  16. Recent research into the policy feedback effects of carceral contact has also focused more intently on the mechanisms connecting this contact to downstream political attitudes and behaviors, showing this contact can exercise indirect effects through feelings of well-being, political trust, and levels of civic duty (Davis, 2020, 2021). Our analysis similarly suggests that age of contact could work in this indirect manner, serving as a mechanism that sits between contact with the police and subsequent political understandings. Space constraints prevent us from pursuing an analysis of this possibility, but we hope that future scholars will explore this avenue.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the audience, fellow panelists, and discussant at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the Political Behavior editorial team who significantly improved this article

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  1. Department of Political Science and International Relations, Simmons University, Boston, MA, USA

    Aaron Rosenthal

  2. Department of Political Science, Carleton College, Northfield, MN, USA

    Christina Farhart

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Rosenthal, A., Farhart, C. Timing Matters: How Adolescent Police Contact Shapes Political Lives. Polit Behav 45, 1933–1958 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-022-09806-1

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