Policing and the life course
Long-term implications of early experiences with policing
University of Manchester
Some housekeeping…
This presentation is loosely based on two related but separate working papers
- Cumulative injustice: Exposure to unjust policing across the life course
- with Jon Jackson (LSE) and Dave Kirk (UPenn)
- Invited submission to the Annual Review of Criminology
- Policing and the life course: Long-term implications of early experiences with policing
- with Nic Fox (UoM) and Paul Quinton (College of Policing)
- Empirical analysis using data from the British Cohort Survey
Some housekeeping…
Funded by two small research grants
- UCL Centre for Global City Policing Small Grants Scheme
- ESRC Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre, Early Carreer Development Fund
Theoretical insights
Teachable moments as static encounters
Most criminological research on procedural justice
- Treats encounters as isolated moments
- Police-citizen encounters
- Police stops
- Highly publicized incidents
“Each of these police-citizen contacts is potentially a ‘teachable moment’ about policing for both citizens and police” (Tyler, Fagan, and Geller 2014, 752)
Teachable moments as dynamic exposures
Encounters are not evaluated on a blank slate
\(\leadsto\) Experiences with law enforcement accumulate over time
\(\leadsto\) Encounters are embedded within broader trajectories of repeated experiences and neighbourhood socialisation
A focus on the persistence of effects
- Effects may be persistent
- Durable cynicism towards the law and the legal institutions
- Weakened social bonds between individuals and society
- Experiences may have life-course implications
- Educational damage
- Mental health problems
- Political participation
Life-course theory of cumulative disadvantage
“The idea of cumulative disadvantage draws on a dynamic conceptualization of social control over the life course, integrated with the one theoretical perspective in criminology that is inherently developmental in nature—labeling theory” (Sampson and Laub 1997, 1–3)
A developmental theory focused on dynamic processes
Cumulative disadvantage mechanism
Turning points and redirected trajectories
Labelling mechanism: individuals labelled as others and excluded from the body politic
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
Our empirical analysis
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 in the UK1
Results
Effects of the number of police stops in adolescence on developmental trajectories of legal cynicism
Analytic Strategy #2
Group-based trajectory modelling
- Developmental trajectories of legal cynicism from age 16 through 34
- Find latent classes of individuals following similar trajectories of legal cynicism
- Trajectories as linear probability models
Results #2
Group-based trajectory modelling
Concluding remarks
From isolated encounters to cumulative trajectories
Cumulative injustice: A research agenda focused on cumulative exposures to unjust policing across the life course
- Dose–response
- Timing
- Trajectories
\(\leadsto\) A life-course approach to procedural justice theory
Thank you!
References
