Race and Policing

The Consequence of Contact

What are the consequences of police contacts for young people? And do these consequences vary by race? Annie and her colleagues’ research on race and policing takes up these questions through an analysis of longitudinal self-report data from young people in Seattle.

They find that that Black children are twice as likely as white children to experience being stopped by the police before they reach the eighth grade and some of the racial differences in early contact is attributable to racial disparities in school discipline (Crutchfield et al. 2009; Crutchfield et al. 2012).

In a third paper, “The Usual, Racialized, Suspects” they ask the extent to which the consequences of police contacts with young people might also differ by race—finding that Black respondents who experience police contact by eighth grade have eleven times greater odds of experiencing arrest in young adulthood compared to their non-contacted peers. White respondents with contact experience no long-term criminal justice consequences. They argue that once Black children have an encounter with police, they become part of a “suspect class” and subject to future police interventions. White children, on the other hand, experience a “racial halo” effect—their racial privileges buffering them from future criminal justice contact.

The paper, which was recently published in Social Problems (McGlynn-Wright, et al., 2020) argues that criminology theories, such as labeling theory, have focused myopically on how criminal justice involvement might increase criminal offending. In doing so, these perspectives have overlooked how the criminal justice system reacts to those with prior justice system involvement and, importantly, how responses differ by race.