Race, Social Bonds, and Juvenile Attitudes toward the Police

Abstract

Relying on survey data collected from over 1,300 students of 13–18 years old across multiple US cities, this study attempts to integrate race into social bond theory to explain the variation in juvenile perceptions of the police. Results indicate significant differential outlooks between white and black teenagers, and to a lesser extent, between white and Hispanic juveniles. Social bonds, especially commitment to school and conventional beliefs, have significant effects on juveniles’ attitudes. The effects of race and social bonds are more independent and social bonds do not mediate the race-attitudes relationship. Other factors, such as juvenile delinquency, victimization, and sense of safety, are also related to juvenile assessments of the police. Implications of the findings are discussed.

Keywords:

• perceptions of the police
• juvenile
• race/ethnicity
• social bond theory

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the journal editor, anonymous reviewers, and Dr Brad Smith for their helpful comments.

Notes

1. Additional factor analysis indicated that while school and religious activities were in the same dimension, job activities were not. This result reflects the importance of taking the type and nature of activities into account when testing social bond theory. For example, conventional job activities may promote conventional behaviors, but a job environment that exposes juveniles to opportunities for crime and association with delinquents and criminals may not promote conventional behaviors. We, therefore, tested different activity variables separately in this study.

2. This measure of conventional beliefs is more of an affective than cognitive measure. Affective indicators, although different from those used in Hirschi’s original thesis, are considered proper and valid for this study as it is reasonable to expect that people who feel guilty or bad when committing certain unlawful acts likely also have stronger beliefs in the legitimacy of moral rules and order. In addition, while the “beliefs” indicators in Hirschi’s original thesis emphasized public views of the legitimacy of legal authorities, our indicators highlight public views of crime and delinquency, which arguably have a more reasonable “distance” and healthy distinction from our dependent variable, attitudes toward the police.

3. Traditional, objective measures of juveniles’ social class, such as parents’ occupation, income, and education, were not available in this dataset. Our measure could be especially useful in studying the juvenile population for two reasons. First, indicators such as “most people are better off than I am” and “I am as well off as most people” directly indicate juveniles’ self-estimation of their class position in society, which further connects to the important concept of relative deprivation and the Mertonian strain tradition (Runciman, 1966; Webber, 2007). Second, access to education is a key indicator of students’ social class. Education can influence juveniles’ future occupation, income, way of life, and influence - all four important dimensions of the Weberian class notion (Kluegel, Singleton, & Starnes, 1977). Thus, juveniles’ beliefs on whether their family can afford them to complete high school and/or go to college directly relate to, and reflect, their subjective class position.

4. The variance inflation factors were all below 4, indicating no serious multicollinearity problem among the predictor variables (Neter, Kutner, Nachtsheim, & Wasserman, 1996). An outlier diagnostic was performed and several cases with an absolute Studentized Residual value larger than 3 were dropped from the analyses. Both the histogram of the standardized residuals and the cumulative probability plot of standardized residuals showed that the residuals were normally distributed. The scatter plot of the predicted scores against residuals indicated no pattern, confirming the linearity of the relationship.

5. We also checked the possible curvilinear effect of age and found no significant effect.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yuning Wu

Yuning Wu is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Wayne State University. Her main research interests include citizen evaluation of criminal justice, policing, and law and society. Her recent articles have appeared in Justice Quarterly, Journal of Criminal Justice, and Crime and Delinquency.

Rodney Lake

Rodney Lake is a doctoral student in the Sociology program at Wayne State University. His research interests include police and juveniles, and racial inequality.

Liqun Cao

Liqun Cao, PhD, is a professor of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada, and Hunan University, China. His research interests include criminological theory, gun ownership, confidence in the police, police integrity, public attitudes toward prostitution, race and ethnicity in criminal justice. He is the author of Major Criminological Theories: Concepts and Measurement (2004). His co-authored paper “Crime volume and law and order culture” (2007) won the 2008 Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences’ Donal MacNamara Award—the best article of the year. He is a life member of Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, American Society of Criminology, and Association of Chinese Professors in Social Sciences in the USA. He is serving as the president of Association of Chinese Criminology and Criminal Justice in the USA (2010–2012).