Unjustified: Youth of Color Navigating Police Presence Across Sociospatial Environments

Hyper-surveillance in marginalized communities places Brown and Black boys at a high risk of involuntary police contact. Prior research, however, has primarily focused on the experiences of youth already labeled delinquent, and has only just begun to explore girls’ lived experiences and differentially surveilled spaces. The current study engages a sociospatial qualitative approach to explore how 84 nondelinquent boys and girls of color experience police presence across a racially/ethnically and socioeconomically segregated metropolitan area in the Northeast region of the United States. Specifically, 41 boys and 43 girls, ages 9–17, of African-American, Latina/Latino, Jamaican-American, Nigerian/Saint Lucian, and multiracial/ethnic descent, participated in semistructured interviews at four community youth centers. The results suggest that nondelinquent youth of color experience police presence in gendered and racialized ways in public spaces, and that such experiences vary across racially/ethnically and socioeconomically segregated cities and suburbs.