Explaining juveniles' attitudes toward the police

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Abstract
Past studies of juveniles' attitudes toward the police suggest a single-cause model that implicates personal interactions with the police. We propose that attitudes toward authority and agents of social control develop in a larger, sociocultural context. Specifically we hypothesize that juveniles' attitudes develop as a function of socialization in their communities' social environment, of their deviant subcultural “preferences,” and of the prior effect of these sociocultural factors on juveniles' contacts with the police. We conducted analyses addressing these hypotheses with a population of males sampled within stratified populations of known delinquents. We found that social background variables, particularly minority status, and subcultural preferences, particularly commitment to delinquent norms, affected juveniles' attitudes toward the police both directly and indirectly (through police-juvenile interactions). We consider directions for improving police relations with juveniles in the context of apparent sociocultural and experiential contingencies to attitude development.