Police-Initiated Contact and Adolescents’ Well-Being: The Roles of Personal and Vicarious Experiences with Police

• In Event: 1-020 - Antecedents and Consequences of Legal Socialization among Ethnically-Racially Diverse Adolescents

Integrative Statement

Adolescents in today’s urban cities experience police-initiated contact at alarming rates (Geller, 2018). Black and Latinx adolescents are more likely to have more frequent and more negative contact with law enforcement than their White peers. Legal socialization, or how adolescents learn to relate and comply with the law and police (Fagan & Tyler, 2005), posits that this negative contact elicits Black and Latino adolescents to perceive the law as cynical and illegitimate. For example, studies show policing has negative and unintended consequences on Black and Latino adolescents’ psychological well-being and induces their engagement in delinquent behavior (Geller et al., 2016; Sewell et al., 2016). Because peers play a central role during adolescence (Blakemore, 2018), peers may provide adolescents with emotional support to help cope with police-based harassment and discrimination. If adolescents who are stopped by police also have peers with a similar history of police-initiated contact, then these adolescents may acquire the emotional support from their peers needed to cope with the negative consequences of police contact. In this study, we examine whether adolescents’ vicarious contact with police through peers may buffer the negative consequences of adolescents’ direct contact on their self-reports of depression, anxiety, and engagement in delinquent behavior. Using a sample of Black, White, and Latino adolescents, we also explore possible ethnic-racial differences.
We draw data from the adolescent sample of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. Data includes 3,004 adolescents who identified as Black (53.3%), Latinx (27.1%), and White (19.6%) and were recruited from 20 urban cities across the United States. Adolescents were on average 15 years old, and they reported on measures of frequency of being stopped by police, self-knowledge of a peer who was stopped by police, depression, anxiety, and delinquent behavior.
We used Mplus version 8.1 to estimated two multiple regression models. In the first regression, we regressed depression, anxiety, and delinquent behavior on direct and vicarious-peer police-initiated contact, and a wide-set of demographic covariates. In the second regression, we added an interaction term as a predictor using centered terms for both direct and vicarious-peer police-initiated contact. Subsequently, we used adolescents’ ethnicity-race as the grouping variable to explore the degree to which our findings varied accordingly to their ethnicity-race. For the full sample, direct contact predicted greater depression, anxiety, and engagement in delinquent behavior, but police stops of peers did not buffer these effects. Police stops of peers did moderate the consequences of direct contact differentially by adolescents’ ethnicity-race. For White adolescents, vicarious-peer contact exacerbated the negative consequences of direct contact on all three outcomes. For Black adolescents, direct and vicarious-peer were unrelated to all three outcomes. For Latino adolescents, vicarious-peer buffered the consequences of direct contact on internalizing symptoms (depression and anxiety) but did not on externalizing symptoms.
This paper underscores the roles of ethnicity-race, policing, and peers in adolescents’ lives. This paper would contribute to the symposium by uncovering the role of ethnicity-race in shaping adolescents’ legal socialization.

Authors

• Juan Del Toro, New York University
  Presenting Author

• Diane Hughes, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author