Policing Families: The Long-Term Consequences of Parental Police Contact on Adolescent Legal Cynicism

Background/Purpose: Exposure to police contact is an experience that often disproportionately impacts marginalized groups, especially in larger urban areas of the United States. A rich body of research shows the myriad adverse effects of experiencing police contact, including its harmful impact on mental health, health, and educational attainment. Police encounters also influence how people perceive law enforcement. Legal cynicism describes people's distrust of legal actors and how they may view legal entities as unresponsive and ineffective. Such distrust may be a substantial threat to public safety if people feel uncomfortable cooperating with law enforcement or reaching out to them in the event of an emergency. Although prior research has documented the connections between legal cynicism and criminal activity, less is known about the potential intergenerational effects of police contact on this specific legal socialization construct. In this paper, we examine 1) the association of parents’ police contact (e.g., police stops) with the degree of legal cynicism among adolescents and 2) whether these associations differ across key sociodemographic groups.

Method: We take advantage of a racially, ethnically, and economically diverse sample from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a population-based longitudinal study following approximately 5,000 individuals born in large U.S. cities in 2000. The legal cynicism scale is constructed as a mean score of 6 items from adolescents’ self-reports at approximately age 15. Mothers’ and fathers’ reports of police stops when their children were ages 3, 5, and 9 are measured as the number of waves where this police encounter was reported: never=49%, 1 wave=31%, 2+ waves=20%). We estimate linear regression models estimating associations between parents’ police stops across childhood with adolescents’ legal cynicism, controlling for a rich set of child and parent characteristics.

Results: Results indicate that adolescents whose parents have been stopped by the police two or more times during their lives have higher levels of legal cynicism. This result remains robust in numerous models, even after controlling for youths’ own reports of being stopped by the police. We also find that these associations are substantially stronger among male adolescents.

Conclusion: Several public safety implications emerge from these findings. This occupying force that police play in the lives of families may further estrange them from seeking help from the very entities tasked with the duty to serve and protect. Instead, the encounters that parents have with police may not only be frequent, but the significance of these experiences may leave indelible marks on adolescents. The impact may contribute to the intergenerational transmission of the message that the police are not trusted authorities.