Ethnoracial and Gender Disparities in Policing among Youth with Different Aggression Patterns

• In Event: Youth Surveillance, Mental Health, and Health Disparities among Urban Teens and Young Adults

Abstract

There are substantial ethnoracial and gender disparities in exposure to violence, as well as resultant use of aggressive behavior. Moreover, responses to aggressive behavior among children and adolescents are differentiated by intersectional social identifiers of young people. Previous research has demonstrated disproportionate involvement of police to respond to Black and Latine young people who are perceived as or actually engaging in aggressive behavior. This project uses longitudinal data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFWCS) to test for ethnoracial and gender inequities in police contact following different trajectories of youth aggressive behavior. We first will explore trajectories of aggressive behavior across the life course using latent class analysis. Next, we will develop a Sankey diagram to reflect transition probabilities after running an unconditional latent transition analysis. Then, we will test whether there are ethnoracial and gender inequities in police contact considering trajectories of aggressive behavior. And finally, we will discuss future directions for this work, wherein we will examine whether and how police contact during adolescence influences outcomes during early adulthood/late adolescence.

Authors

• James Keoni Morris, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health – Department of Mental Health

• Xiaoshuang Iris Luo, University of Akron

• Radhika Raghunathan, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health – Department of Mental Health

• Amanda Geller, University of California, Irvine

• Rebecca L. Fix, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health