Coalition in Criminal Justice

Adolescent and police interactions in London

Jeffrey DeMarco, PhD Candidate, Centre for Criminology and Sociology

Aims and Objectives

Ethnographic Power and hierarchies

Interpretive Antagonism versus improvements Generalizability and transferability

Quantitative Trust in the police Behavioural intentions

Background

Volunteer organization for adolescents aged 14-19

Training for leadership and inclusion roles within community

Instil discipline, knowledge and philanthropy

Develop team-work, healthy competition and co-operation

Interactions with police and other community leaders

Background characteristics

Over 200 young men and women

58% were male average age of 15.7 years 1/3 were of BME background

49 % single parent homes 49 % had parental unemployment in the household

Over 1/5 claimed that they had poor parental relationships conflict in the house, lack of praise, unawareness of behaviour and activities

20% frequently were truant whilst 23% had been excluded from formal education

Engagement through observation

Power as a tool for good Youth-facilitators Peer leader-youth Youth-youth

Foucauldian Discipline Structure

Therapeutic alliance (Brodin, 1975) Bonds Tasks Goals

Trust in the police

Improper policing

Faith/belief

Troubled relations

Negative perceptions

Improvement

External antagonists

Trust in Authority Questionnaire (TAQ)

15-item measure Three sub-scales: TAQ General TAQ Authority TAQ police

Reliability Internal consistency α = 0.81 Inter-rater α = 0.90

Validity

Mass administration to come MPA Europol? Interpol?

Associations

Quality of contact TAQ Police r = -0.28** TAQ Overall r = -0.24**

Police attitudes TAQ Police r = -0.43** TAQ Overall r = -0.43**

Psychopathology Conduct Disorder r = 0.36** Overall r = 0.30**

Intentions to co-operate

Police Interactions TAQ Police TAQ Overall

Call the police -0.24* -0.24*

Interact if mugged -0.21* -0.16

Knife Crime -0.33** -0.23*

Overall interaction with police

-0.25** -0.17

Predictive trust model

Trust in the police

r² = 0.474

Quality β = -.42

Attitudesβ = -.17

Conduct Disorder β = .29

Implications

Baseline and follow-up for community programs

Comparison group outside of police Dissertation contains qualitative output from other focus groups

Funding/Expansion of community engagement programs Navy cadets, Project Trident

Intergroup contact Optimal conditions to ameliorate the aforementioned issued

Vicarious trust—proxy police

Conclusions and steps forward

Difficult relationship

Installation of authority

Promising positive interactions

Possibility of using other professionals Expansion of cadets?

Thank you!

Questions?Comments?

Queries?

Jeffrey.demarco.2009@live.rhul.ac.ukJ.demarco@mdx.ac.uk