Evaluating a model program for improving law enforcement officers’ perceptions of and interactions with youth in a diverse urban setting

ABSTRACT

Negative and, at times, violent encounters between police and youth have received increasing attention in recent years, leading to calls for more targeted training of law enforcement. In Pennsylvania, legal stakeholders collaborated to create a manualized curriculum training designed to educate law enforcement on developmentally appropriate ways to interact with youth and generate conversation between police and young people (particularly youth of color) with the goals of reducing stereotyping and improving relationships between these two groups and, ultimately, reducing racial and ethnic disparities in youth arrest rates. The current study evaluated change in law enforcement perceptions from 24 trainings conducted in Philadelphia – a city populated predominantly with residents of color – which included both formal and informal interactions with young, predominantly Black, volunteers. Data from the Police-Youth Engagement Survey, completed both before and after trainings by 1,344 police recruits, indicated curriculum acceptability and recruits’ willingness to use information from the training in their future interactions with youth. Recruits’ attitudes towards youth and their perceptions of the relationship between police and young people also significantly improved. Results indicate that this training may be a promising initial intervention for improving interactions between law enforcement and youth, including youth of color.

KEYWORDS:

• police interactions
• youth justice
• racial and ethnic disparities
• police training
• training evaluation

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all those who worked on the development and evaluation of the Curriculum over the years, including Elizabeth McCurdy, Suraji Wagage, and the numerous undergraduate research assistants and co-op students in the Juvenile Justice Research and Reform Lab at Drexel University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data are not publicly available given that the data were originally collected as quality improvement data, not research data. Although permission to use deidentified data for research purposes was obtained, police recruits were told that the raw data would only be seen by the research team. Thus, we cannot make it available at this time without violating the understanding with which police recruits provided the data.

Notes

1 More specifically, 43.0% of the city’s population identifies solely as Black, compared to 13.6% of the national population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2021a; U.S. Census Bureau, 2021b). An additional 12.4% of the city’s population identifies with another minoritized racial group (i.e., Asian, American Indian/Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, multiracial) compared to 10.9% of the national population; 16.1% of Philadelphians identify as Hispanic or Latino, compared to 19.1% of the national population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2021a; U.S. Census Bureau, 2021b).

2 The PA DMC Curriculum provides the option to complete the training in either a half-day or full-day format, the latter of which includes an additional module that involves more role-play activities with officers and youth, who then debrief about what worked well and what could have been improved in each scenario. In Philadelphia (i.e., the setting of the current evaluation), training providers implement the half-day format of the training.

3 This analysis was applied to the data in long format (i.e., two rows per recruit, one for pre-training responses and one for post-training responses); thus, variances were pooled across time, modeling the factor structure as invariant between these two time points and allowing for subsequent analysis of longitudinal change.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency [grant number: 33649, 30291].