Tracing the Emotional Echoes of Police Contact in Everyday Life

• In Event: Children at the Fault Lines: Rights, Protection, and State Violence

Abstract

This paper aims to understand how an institution like policing shapes social-emotional well-being by analyzing the impact of police stops on daily emotional life for youth. Specifically, I ask: How does experiencing a personal police stop influence daily emotional life? How does this distinguish from a vicarious (witnessing) police stop and no police stop? And how do the contextual factors surrounding personal and vicarious police contact influence daily emotional life? Using random-intercept modeling, I find that, on average, personal and vicarious police stops are associated with higher levels of daily anger, compared to no police stops. Additionally, up and above being personally stopped, those with more negative emotional experiences during the stop have elevated levels of anger. These results show that police exposure is embodied. These experiences infiltrate the body and manifest as heightened levels of intense emotions, which, long-term, are detrimental to bodily regulation and other physiological processes (Bericat, 2016; Denollet et al., 2008; Maiese, 2014). Understanding how everyday police interactions echo across daily life is critical in conceptualizing policing as a form of slow violence that attacks our socio-emotional well-being, alters how our body makes meaning of social situations, and accumulates to produce negative health consequences (Kramer & Remster, 2022; Maiese, 2014; Sewell, 2020).

Authors

• Jasmyne Nelson, University of Texas-Austin

• Jacob E. Cheadle, University of Texas at Austin