Perpetual Encounters: Reconceptualizing Police Contact and its Relationship to Black Women's Health

• In Event: Police Contact and Health

Abstract

While traditional conceptualizations of police contact are confined to direct officer-civilian interaction, extant literature documents both preparation for encounters and policing advocacy work that challenge the bounds of contact, and importantly, its relationship to mental health. In this paper we introduce “perpetual encounters” to both theoretically and empirically move closer to how police contact is experienced in Black women’s everyday lives. Utilizing a nationally representative dataset on Black women’s policing experiences, we explore 3 questions: 1) Do observed associations between individual components of perpetual encounters and mental health mirror broader literature? 2) Does the relationship between all three facets of contact (i.e., interaction effects) reveal potential “spillover effects” for mental health? Stated differently, what is lost when preparation and advocacy remain taken for granted components of contact? And last 3) Does advocacy counteract, at least in part, the hypothesized negative impact of direct contact (i.e., moderating effect)? Beyond exemplifying how pervasive law enforcement is in the day-to-day lives of marginalized communities, extending the scope of contact reveals a previously unacknowledged curve effect in which preparation and direct contact may pose threats to mental health, while advocacy can be a protective, health boosting activity that counteracts its ill-effects.

Authors

• Faith M. Deckard, University of Texas at Austin

• Shannon Malone Gonzalez, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Jamie Feng-Yuan Hsu, University of Texas at Austin