CUMULATIVE INJUSTICE:
Exposure to unjust policing across the life course
University of Manchester
London School of Economics
University of Pennsylvania
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
Our goals
Develop a developmental model of cumulative injustice, reframing experiences with policing from isolated encounters to trajectories of exposure across the life course
Review evidence that repeated direct, network, and neighborhood exposures to unfair policing catalyze stigmatized identities and weakened social bonds with the state
Synthesize procedural justice and legal cynicism literatures to theorize how exclusionary messages from policing become embedded in identities, communities, and intergenerational narratives
Specify a research agenda for causal, longitudinal study of cumulative injustice, distinguishing exposure timing, dose, and trajectory, and testing identity-based mechanisms of estrangement
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)
A community-level attribute that constrains people’s strategies of action
Builds on the life-course theory of cumulative disadvantage (Sampson and Laub 1997)
Neighborhood socialization: police officers are there to protect others against us
Some critical views of PJT
Monica Bell’s theory of legal estrangement (Bell 2017)
- Procedural injustice
- Vicarious marginalization
- Structural exclusion
\(\leadsto\) PJT overlooks the broader structural and historical forces that shape how Black communities in the US interpret the law
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
Cumulative injustice
“At both an interactional and structural level, current [policing] regimes can operate to effectively banish whole communities from the body politic. The legal estrangement perspective treats social inclusion as the ultimate end of law enforcement” (Bell 2017, 2067)
Cumulative injustice send exclusionary signals
- The police are not there to protect us, the police are there to protect others from us
\(\leadsto\) Individuals socialized in a context of cumulative injustice are labelled as others and excluded from the body politic
Life-course consequences of cumulative injustice
\(\Rightarrow\) Feelings of non-belonging and social exclusion
Erosion of legitimacy & rise of cynicism
Generalized mistrust
- Lower civic engagement
- Reduced voter turnout
- Disengagement from institutions
- Lower civic engagement
System avoidance
Crime involvement & resistance
Stress & intergenerational transmission
Toward a research program on cumulative injustice
Focus on cumulative exposures to policing during the life course
- Dose–response
- Timing
- Trajectories
Methodological innovation
- Longitudinal data linking survey + administrative records
- Causal inference: marginal structural models, LTMLE
- Triangulation: surveys, admin data, ethnography
Concluding remarks
- From isolated encounters → to cumulative trajectories
- Cumulative injustice reshapes:
- Identities
- Legitimacy
- Civic bonds
- Intergenerational narratives
- Identities
\(\leadsto\) A life-course science of cumulative injustice
Thank you!
References
