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The growth of “proactive policing” and the greater presence of police in schools has resulted in an increase in police contact experienced by youth in urban communities. Research has consistently found that direct and vicarious police contact is associated with a wide range of negative outcomes. However, scholarship has yet to examine whether direct and vicarious police contact are associated with grit, an important gap because grit has been found to be associated with important long term outcomes. Moreover, research has rarely examined the processes that may help to mitigate the negative implications of police contact for youth. In this paper we begin to fill this gap by examining the association between direct and vicarious police contact and youth’s grit and whether living in a neighborhood with high levels of collective efficacy can help mitigate the negative implications of police contact for grit.
Method
Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study and multivariate OLS regression models, we examine whether direct police contact (being stopped by police), vicarious police contact, and collective efficacy are associated with grit after controlling for a wide range of individual, family, and contextual factors. After examining these initial associations, we then conducted separate subgroup analyses among youth who experienced no police contact, youth who experienced direct police contact, and youth experienced vicarious (but not direct) police contact. In these analyses, we test whether living in a neighborhood with high collective efficacy is associated with higher levels of grit among youth who have experienced police contact. The Fragile Families data are particularly well-suited for this analysis because they sampled youth born in 20 large cities, oversampled disadvantaged families (families that are more likely to have had negative experiences with police), and contain a wide array of, individual, family, and contextual characteristics that can be incorporated as controls.
Results
Our multivariate analyses lead to several key findings. First, youth who have been stopped by police have significantly levels of grit that are approximately 0.40 standard deviations lower than youth who have not experienced any police contact. Second, youth who have experienced vicarious police contact have approximately 0.20 standard deviations lower grit than youth who have not experienced any police contact. Third, a one standard deviation increase in collective efficacy is associated with approximately a 0.14 standard deviation increase in Grit. Last, increases in collective efficacy remain significantly associated with higher levels of grit in subsample analyses that focus on implications specifically for youth who have experienced police contact.
Discussion
Our study is consistent with prior work that suggests that relying on aggressive policing has negative consequences in domains other than crime control. Based on this growing body of evidence, we believe policymakers should reconsider use of aggressive policing as an approach to crime control. However, in instances where this is not politically feasible, our results suggest that investments in neighborhoods that help build collective efficacy may mitigate the negative implications that aggressive policing has for youth.