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Abstract
Recent media accounts have highlighted issues of use and abuse of police force and policing practices targeted at ethnic minorities within inner city areas. To date, little research has focussed specifically on the experiences and perceptions of youth gang members in dealing with police. Using data from 253 in-depth interviews with ethnic minority San Francisco-based youth gang members, we examine perceptions of respectful and disrespectful police behaviour. Premised on a procedural justice model, we explore how frequently disrespectful police behaviour is reported and how these negative experiences shape gang members’ attitudes towards the police more generally. We refine our investigation by comparing adverse encounters to examples in which gang members are treated respectfully. Using a data-driven inductive and qualitative theory testing deductive approach, our data revealed that male and female gang members regularly experience disrespectful police behaviour in terms of physical and verbal abuse. Our findings indicate that these exchanges contribute to negative attitudes, fear and distrust of police, while respectful interactions are meaningful and can contribute to positive attitudes towards officers.
Acknowledgements
Collection of data for this article was made possible by funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse [RO1-DA 021333] (PI: Dr. G. Hunt).
Declaration of interest
There are no conflicts of interest to report.
Notes
1 It should be noted there were some redaction challenges with the several of the transcriptions. There were two transcribers on the project and one, in particular, redacted their transcripts extensively. This rendered some portion of the data unreadable and unusable as details, specifics, or context of the interviews could not be established. This was not common and only impacted a small fraction of the entire dataset.
2 One male respondent described being arrested 302 times of which 300 were for public intoxication. He described wanting to be arrested for public intoxication so that he could have somewhere, like jail, to sleep for the night.
3 The male respondent who reported being arrested 302 times was omitted from the averages, given that he was an outlier. Including him, the average was 12.5 arrests per male respondent. His experiences were included in the analysis.
4 This may be a result of the original focus of the study and had they been probed about more general crime involvement, it is possible additional situations may have been discussed.
5 One male respondent explained that being on probation complicated expectations of respect. Specifically, if on probation, he perceived the police as having “the right to talk hella shit to you anyway or do whatever they want to.”