Cumulative injustice
Police stops and the development of legal cynicism in the life course
University of Manchester
My goal today
\(\leadsto\) Do adolescents with cumulative experiences of police stops develop enduring legal cynicism that persists into adulthood?
An issue with the literature
Most research on the effects of exposures to policing:
- Treats encounters as isolated moments
- Police-citizen encounters
- Police stops
- Highly publicized incidents
- Misses how experiences with law enforcement accumulate over time (Oliveira et al. 2021; Oliveira 2024, 2025; Fine et al. 2025)
\(\leadsto\) Yet, encounters are embedded within broader trajectories of repeated experiences and neighbourhood socialisation
Theoretical foundations
Procedural justice theory
“Each of these police-citizen contacts is potentially a ‘teachable moment’ about policing for both citizens and police” (Tyler, Fagan, and Geller 2014, 752)
- Every encounter in which an officer exercises authority is a teachable moment in which individuals update their expectations about how they will be treated in the future
- Group engagement model: fair treatment communicates that individuals are valued members of the wider group that legal authority represents (Tyler and Blader 2003)
Legal cynicism theory
“Legal cynicism refers to a cultural orientation in which the law and the agents of its enforcement, such as the police and courts, are viewed as illegitimate, unresponsive, and ill equipped to ensure public safety” (Kirk and Papachristos 2011, 1191)
Builds on the life-course theory of cumulative disadvantage (Sampson and Laub 1997)
Neighborhood socialization: police officers are there to protect others against us
Our proposal
A developmental model of repeated teachable moments
Reframe experiences with unjust policing as cumulative, developmental, and contextual
Each individual event remains a teachable moment, but they are embedded within trajectories of exposure across the life course
- Direct exposures
- Network exposures
- Neighborhood exposures
- Intergenerational experiences
Cumulative injustice
Encounters communicate inclusion or exclusion — but we need to situate those signals within the temporal, cultural, and structural contexts in which they are lived
“I was eight when I first got stopped. (…) Thirteen, fourteen, that’s when I get stopped at least three times a week” (Haldipur 2018, 43)
Accumulated experiences of unjust policing across the life course
\(\Rightarrow\) socialization context of cumulative injustice
Preliminary empirical evidence
Data
British Cohort Study
- Following the lives of 17,000 people born in the UK in 1970
- 12 sweeps of data collection, from infancy to age 46
Measures
- Any experiences of police stops between ages 10 and 16
- Number of experiences of police stops followed by a warning between ages 10 and 16
- Legal cynicism measured at ages 16, 26, 30, and 34
Analytic strategy
Growth curve model
- Developmental trajectories of legal cynicism from age 16 through 34
- Influence of the number of police stops followed by a warning between ages 10 and 16 on those developmental trajectories
- Effects on the initial state of the trajectories
- Effects on the shape of the trajectories
Analytic strategy
- Binary outcome: Legal cynicism at ages 16, 26, 30, 34
- Time specification: age and age squared (quadratic growth curve)
- Main explanatory variable: number of police stops followed by a warning between ages 10 and 16 (square rooted)
- Covariates:
- demographics (sex, ethnicity, socioeconomic status)
- psycho-social confounders at age 10 (impulsivity, aggressiveness, learning scores)
- behavioural confounders at age 10 (bullying behaviour, violent behaviour)
\(\leadsto\) Multilevel growth curve model specified with a logistic function link and interaction terms
Results
Average developmental trajectory of legal cynicism among all respondents1
Results
Effects of the number of police stops in adolescence on developmental trajectories of legal cynicism
Thank you!
References
ASC 2025 | Nov 14 2025 