Aggressive Policing as an Individual and Environmental Social Determinant of Health among Urban Adolescents

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

Abstract

A long history of American police violence has received new attention in recent years. The ubiquity of cellphone cameras, coupled with the ability of images and incidents to “go viral” on the internet, has contributed to the recognition of aggressive policing as a threat to individual and community health, particularly for Black Americans. A growing literature has shown that both personal contact with the police and residence in a heavily policed environment are associated with adverse mental health outcomes; however, much more remains to be learned. In this paper we explore this question using survey data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal birth cohort study of urban-born adolescents interviewed between 2014 and 2017 (N=2,379), coupled with national data on fatal police violence in their Census tracts and broader residential environments. Preliminary analyses suggest that police violence is proximate to contemporary youth; over 20% of teens interviewed had been stopped by the police, and over 20% of teens interviewed, including many who had not been stopped themselves, had an officer-involved fatality in their county in the month leading up to their interview. We explore interactions between these experiences and their effects on adolescent anxiety and depression.

Authors

• Amanda Geller, University of California, Irvine

• Kariar Al-Naiem, University of California, Irvine

• Cristian Apolinar, University of California, Irvine

• Kristin Catena, Princeton University

• P'trice Jones, University of California, Irvine

• Panpan Yang, Princeton University