Police-initiated contacts: young people, ethnicity, and the ‘usual suspects’

Abstract

This article uses data from the Offending Crime and Justice Survey, a representative survey of young people in England and Wales, to estimate the factors that affect the likelihood of police-initiated contacts. Although official data clearly show that members of ethnic minorities are disproportionally approached by the police in their use of powers to stop and search, we have only a partial understanding of the relevance of ethnicity net of other factors. Our findings suggest that even when we control for other sociodemographic factors, self-reported illegal behaviour, area characteristics and degree of street presence, ethnicity still matters. Our findings also support previous research suggesting that the police focus their gaze at a population of the ‘usual suspects’.

Keywords:

• stop and search
• ethnicity
• youth

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dave Gadd, Jon Shute, Bill Hebenton, Graham Smith, and Josephine Connolly as well as the anonymous reviewers of the journal, for the useful recommendations they provided to previous drafts of this article.

Notes

1. Nor asked about these types of police contacts in 2003 when it did oversample ethnic minorities.

2. The OCJS also includes an administrative variable that indexes the level of deprivation. This variable classifies respondents according to the deciles in the index deprivation score. This score is computed taking different dimensions of deprivation, including crime levels. Unfortunately, this variable is only available for the English sample, since Wales uses a different index of deprivation that was not attached to the public data set. Although not presented here (available upon request), to assess the robustness of the results we also ran all the analysis described below with just the English sample and this measure of deprivation as a control variable. In none of these models was this measure of deprivation significant. Equally the pattern of results, in relation to the other covariates, was the same regardless of its inclusion.