Juveniles’ Relationship with The Police in The Multi-Ethnic City

• In Event: Police-Community Relations in A Comparative Perspective

Abstract

By retrieving on a unique large-scale youth-survey (N=ca. 20.000), this talk delivers first-hand insights on nature and challenges of juveniles’ interaction with the police in the multi-ethnic (European) city.
Data from a German-French Research Project is used to provide empirical evidence for predictors of juveniles’ contact with the police, to depict juveniles’ experiences during those encounters and to assess which factors are more likely to jeopardize their trust in the police.
According to the findings, young people frequently interact with the police, yet some juveniles disproportionally often report contacts with the police. Particularly the adolescents of North African origin in France report significantly more police-initiated contacts, more physical violence during those contacts, and hold lower levels of trust in the police.
Next to the ethnic minority status the impact of cultural identity, social ties, social deprivation and experiences with delinquency on juveniles’ probability of reporting police-initiated contacts, on their attitudes toward the police, and on their specific experiences during the contact with the police, is discussed. Additionally, results from the analysis of the impact of neighborhood effects on juveniles’ relationship with the police are presented.
Finally, limits and challenges of large-scale comparative research on youth-police relationship are addressed.

Author

• Anina Schwarzenbach, Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law