Proactive or Predatory? A Regional Examination of Policing Youth Using Officer-Reported Data

• In Event: Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Topic - Race, Ethnicity, Culture, Context

Abstract

Recent, high-profile murders of Black Americans by police again underscore the need to continue examining police practices in the United States with urgency. Proactive policing, the strategic use of police-initiated contact (e.g., police stops) against individuals deemed “at risk” for criminogenic behavior, has been shown to be pervasive in disadvantaged communities (Brunson & Miller, 2005; Geller et al., 2014), disproportionately targets Black youth (Stewart et al., 2009), and demonstrably leads to increased psychosocial distress among Black youth (Del Toro et al., 2019; Jackson et al., 2019; Nordberg, Crawford, Praetorius, & Hatcher, 2016). Supporters of proactive policing strategies point to evidence of deterrence against future justice involvement (e.g., fewer future arrests; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018). However, studies using officer-reported data to examine these possible deterrence effects remain limited. The California Racial Identity Profiling Act of 2015 (RIPA) was passed, in part, to address this empirical gap and the need to increase law enforcement transparency and accountability. Under RIPA, law enforcement officers in California are required to complete surveys after every police-initiated stop (e.g., capturing perceived demographics of the civilian, officer actions taken, and stop outcome). Given the serious implications that proactive policing stops have on the well-being of Black youth, and mixed evidence for deterrence effects, the current presentation seeks to leverage officer-reported data from RIPA to explore the connection between police-initiated stops of youth and youth arrests. The present study analyzes data collected between July and December of 2018 from two counties in Southern California. During that time, officers stopped approximately 1,976 youth (ages ranged from 5 - 17, Mage = 15.07, SD = 2.44; 31.8% female). We aggregated stop incidents by zip code to examine community-wide stop and arrest trends across 109 neighborhoods. We used linear regression analyses to determine whether the number of police stops of youth in the summer predicted the number of youth arrests in the fall. Our preliminary analysis of the RIPA data indicates that summer youth stops predicted a slight increase in fall youth arrests, controlling for summer youth arrests (β = .05, t(108) = 2.44, p = .017), a finding contrary to the deterrence hypothesis. As well, Black youth were overrepresented in police stops in these two counties compared to the general state population (24.4% vs. 6.5%; U.S. Census Bureau, 2019). Additional analysis of these data will explore whether Black youth are more likely to experience police aggression (e.g., baton use, chemical spray, canine bite) compared to youth from other racial groups, and will incorporate Census data to determine if youth policing patterns differ by neighborhood characteristics (e.g., racial-ethnic composition, income level). These preliminary findings appear to challenge the deterrence hypothesis, while corroborating youth reports of discrimination from police (Del Toro et al., 2019; Loyd et al., 2019). Discussion will focus on the importance of police transparency, its role in developmental scholarship, and implications of the findings for identifying systems that promote, rather than hinder, Black youth’s health and development.

Authors

• James Tate LeBlanc, University of California - Riverside
  Presenting Author

• Yssis Davis, University of California - Riverside
  Non-Presenting Author

• Aerika Brittian Loyd, University of California - Riverside
  Non-Presenting Author