Introduction

Youth, defined as persons between the ages of 10 and 24 (Centers for Disease Control, 2014), have the most involuntary contact with police officers (Eith & Durose, 2011). Many minority youth live in neighborhoods disproportionately targeted for proactive policing (i.e., using broad police discretion to “target” those most likely to be engaged in criminal activity before criminal acts become apparent) results in frequent involuntary youth encounters with police officers (Clarke, 2006). Often, these encounters with the police shape youth attitudes, perceptions, and identity. Moreover, recent deadly minority youth-police encounters have raised important questions about police misconduct.

Data on police behavior, particularly alleged misconduct, are especially difficult to find and are estimates at best. The FBI publishes statistics on justifiable killings by police officers based on voluntary information from a small fraction of police departments (Hansen, 2015). Recent reports from a national grassroots organization have estimated that extra-judicial killing of Black people in the United States by police, security guards, or vigilantes occurs once every 28 h; 8 % being minors, 18 % being 18–21 years old, and 40 % being 22–31 years old (Akuno & Eisen, 2013). There are attempts to estimate deaths by police and track conduct using media reports as data sources by the Guardian, and the Washington Post (Hansen, 2015). The federal government has acknowledged the serious lack of transparency about police conduct and legislation has been proposed that would require law enforcement agencies to report all incidents resulting in serious injury or death (officer or civilian) (Hansen, 2015). Also, President Obama has recently launched the Task Force on 21st Century Policing to improve transparency and boost public trust (Hansen, 2015). Some minority youth-police encounters involve officer misconduct and some do not but the lack of transparency exacerbates attempts to fully contextualize and comprehend the experiences of minority youth who come into involuntary contact with police officers.

Minority youth-police encounters are a contentious and important issue for social work practitioners, scholars, and educators. An examination of the responses of social workers to the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) statement on the Ferguson Grand Jury decision (NASW, 2014) indicates the passionate and discordant views of some of our peers. Understanding the experiences of minority youth who encounter police officers is of critical concern for social workers in many practice and research areas. In order to meet this social justice need, social workers must examine how a minority person’s perception of the police is formed.

Race and socioeconomic status contribute disproportionately to a minority person’s perception of the police, with lower socioeconomic status affecting people across race equally with lower ratings for police satisfaction, while higher socioeconomic status raised perceptions for Whites more so than for Blacks (Wu, Sun, & Triplett, 2009). A recent systematic review of 92 quantitative studies revealed that people who identified as Black, non-white, and minority were more likely to have negative attitudes and perceptions of police compared with their White counterparts (Peck, 2015). There is evidence that Black pedestrians and motorists stopped by the police are more likely to have negative perceptions of the police and to report police abuse towards residents of their neighborhood (Weitzer, Tuch, & Skogan, 2008). While race and socioeconomic status played important roles in the perceptions of the police, personal and anecdotal experiences also played roles in how individuals viewed the police. Positive interactions with the police lessened negative feelings toward police in general, whereas negative experiences with the police increased negative ratings across all spectrums, including efficacy, general police feelings, need for services, and fear of police (Schuck & Rosenbaum, 2005; Schuck, Rosenbaum, & Hawkins, 2008). Moreover, studies have shown that positive interactions with the police, both formal and informal, can improve an individual’s perception of the police across race and age groups (Hinds, 2009; Maxson, Hennigan, & Sloane, 2003; Reisig & Parks, 2002). Because an individual’s perception of the police is broadly formed by that individual’s experience with the police in formal and informal contacts (Schuck & Rosenbaum, 2005; Weitzer & Tuch, 2005), an examination of minority youth experiences with the police will broaden our understanding of how minority youth perceive the police today. Social workers interact with minority youth in many contexts, including juvenile justice systems, school systems, and community programs. Social workers are often perceived as “agents of the state” (Bourdieu in Bourdieu et al., 2002, p. 184; Braithwaite, 2004; Skerrett, 2000), who must balance professional obligations to ease the suffering of clients with the bureaucratic and administrative obligations imposed by local, state, and federal agencies that employ us. Our interactions with minority youth occur within the context of our negotiated roles and their perceptions of the police and other figures of authority. Our services to marginalized, minority youth must be informed by the reality of their perceptions and their environment in order to be effective. This study seeks to capture these experiences and understanding through the voices of minority youth in recounting their contacts with the police in their daily lives—their lived experience of the phenomenon.

Method

The synthesis of qualitative research is relatively new to social work with only a handful of published studies (Birnbaum & Saini, 2012; Connolly, Heifetz, & Bohr, 2012; Corcoran, Brown, Davis, Pineda, Kadolph, & Bell, 2013; Forte, 2009; Hodge, Horvath, Larking, & Curl, 2012; Kerson & McCoyd, 2013) using a variety of approaches to synthesis. Qualitative Interpretive Meta-Synthesis (QIMS) was introduced and described in detail by (Aguirre & Bolton, 2014) to propose a systematic approach to synthesis of qualitative studies. It was developed specifically for social work and is consonant with the profession’s values and goals (Aguirre & Bolton, 2014). QIMS is “interpretive” in that it employs an interpretive rather than an aggregating process of synthesis; “meta” refers to the aim of changing or enhancing understanding of the phenomenon under consideration and “synthesis” denotes the combination of different ideas and understandings (Aguirre & Bolton, 2014). Given the recent innovation of QIMS, there are understandably few published studies that utilize the method (e.g., Aguirre & Bolton, 2013; Barnett & Aguirre, 2015; Bowers, 2013; Frank & Aguirre, 2013; Maleku & Aguirre, 2014; Sliva, 2014; Smith & Aguirre, 2012). QIMS aims to draw together disparate qualitative accounts into a “web of knowledge” about a topic that results in a “new, deeper, and broader understand” (Aguirre & Bolton, 2013, p. 5). Following the development of the research question, QIMS consists of the authors’ roles and credibility—consisting of descriptions of their activities in the QIMS and their trainings, experiences, and biases as recommended by Patton (2002) for all qualitative research, sampling the literature, theme extraction and translation (Aguirre & Bolton, 2013).

Instrumentation

It is the norm in qualitative research to use the authors as the primary instruments of the study; this creates a necessity for the authors to reveal their professional and personal experiences along with training related to the focus of the study in order to disclose possible biases (Patton, 2002). In this particular study, the first author was the primary instrument, analyzing the data from each of the synthesized studies. The second, third and fourth authors served as her co-analysts, fielding her questions and verifying her interpretations against the data in the published studies. A brief description of the authors’ qualifications to conduct this research is warranted along with details of their racial and ethnic backgrounds as these inform their own experiences of policing and reveal their possible biases in analyzing the data. These descriptions reveal how each brought a unique perspective to the analysis, producing a well-rounded synthesis. These perspectives included those of a White female, White male, Latina female, and Black female with various experiences related to the topic based on professional work within the criminal justice system and being minorities living with institutional discrimination.

First Author

I conduct research with vulnerable populations in contact with the criminal justice system. Specifically, I am concerned with the power dynamics between citizens and criminal justice authorities in various contexts. I am most interested in the subaltern (those who are politically, geographically, and socially outside the hegemonic power structure) perspective and seek to stress those voices in my work. I have done phenomenological and ethnographic work in criminal courts, have projects within jails, and with people variously in contact with law enforcement. My work is primarily qualitative and has a strong human rights focus. I provide an etic voice to this QIMS as I am a White woman who was born and raised in Canada and our policing system and conceptualization of race and ethnicity are dissimilar to the United States despite our proximity.

Second Author

My primary areas of research are focused on youth involved in child welfare or in the juvenile justice systems. Specifically, I look at youth who crossover from foster care to juvenile justice and examine the causes, implications, and outcomes for such youth. My previous research has been both qualitative and quantitative. As a White male who grew up in the Midwestern United States, I view these experiences in many ways as an outsider; however, as a foster and adoptive parent to young men whose race and background differ from my own, I have had to navigate the complex dynamic often associated with youth and race in police interactions in this country.

Third Author

I have served as both a social worker and social work researcher in the areas of health, trauma, and suicide for over 15 years. My relevant experience includes delivering public health education within predominantly Black high schools and studying the intersection of trauma and suicidality among incarcerated women. I also co-developed QIMS and, thus, trained and mentored my co-authors in its production. Finally, I am of Latina descent and grew up in a predominantly White town in the South where I was singled out for and experienced discrimination based on my ethnicity.

Fourth Author

I have been a social worker for approximately 20 years, serving as a practitioner, university professor, community-based researcher, and program administrator. The majority of my work has focused on issues of race, class, and social policy implications for African Americans. As a Black woman raised in the South in a high-poverty town and as a graduate of a Historically Black College and University, my work has been personally connected to addressing critical issues in my community as well. As director of a center for African American Studies, my recent work has focused on facilitating the discussion of race and contextualizing it with historical, cultural, and social determinants on and off campus, as well as creating student development models of success in higher education. My social work research has also focused on health promotion strategies for incarcerated youth and adults including determining policy, systemic, and process characteristics that influence the cycle of detention

Sampling

Sampling consistent with QIMS is a combination of purposive and theoretical and should be an exhaustive review of qualitative studies including grey literature such as dissertations (Aguirre & Bolton, 2013). For this study, we searched Google Scholar, Social Work Abstracts, Web of Science, and ProQuest Criminal Justice databases to identify relevant qualitative studies in the fields of criminology, social sciences, psychology, urban studies, ethnic studies, social issues, social work, anthropology, behavioral sciences, and social geography. Title and basic searches were completed for the topical terms adolescents, youth, young, juveniles, minors, teenagers, kids, Black, African American, Hispanic, Latino, police, policing, proactive policing, and racial profiling coupled with methodological terms including phenomenology, ethnography, narrative, grounded theory, case study, and qualitative.

Inclusion criteria for this study included studies that (1) were published in peer-reviewed journals, theses, or dissertations; (2) were published in English; (3) sampled minority youth in the United States; (4) were dated after the mid-1980sFootnote 1; and (5) were conducted using qualitative methods in whole or part of a mixed methods design. The topical criterion was the experiences, perceptions or attitudes of minority youth of police encounters.

The search yielded 1227 potentially relevant studies. Title review eliminated 981 studies, many of which were duplicates, narrowing the search to 246 studies which could not be eliminated based on title alone. Abstract review eliminated 237 studies because they failed to meet inclusion criteria, most frequently because they were quantitative, but also because they were not specifically related to minority youth experiences, they were studies outside the United States, or they were policy-related rather than experiential. This narrowed the sample to nine articles that met the inclusion criteria for topic and method and describe the experiences of 377 minority youths (12–23 years) in five geographical locations (Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, Oakland, and St. Louis), and six research studies. A quorum chart (Fig. 1) details the sampling process and Table 1 provides a detailed synopsis of each study.

Fig. 1
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Quorum chart

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Table 1 Demographics of studies included in the qualitative interpretive meta-synthesis
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Theme Extraction

Having described our credibility and the sampling process, the next step is to report the nine studies’ original themes. The original themes were extracted intact from the original research papers to maintain the integrity of the original authors’ interpretations (Table 2). Essentially, this process involves reporting the themes of each study as identified by the authors of the original studies in the original publications using their wording.

Table 2 Themes extracted from original studies
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Translation: The Path to Synergistic Understanding with a Phenomenological Lens

Theme extraction generated a view of the data that exemplifies what the creators of QIMS envisioned as synergistic understanding—synergy is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Taken individually, each study depicted the youths’ experiences of policing to a degree. Taken together, the nine studies immersed us deeper into their collective plight—something that the studies individually do not achieve as easily if at all. This process involved utilizing an approach based on interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) to guide translation. According to Pietkiewicz and Smith (2014, p. 11), for this process

It is recommended that researchers totally immerse themselves in the data or, in other words, try to step into the participants’ shoes as far as possible. IPA aims at giving evidence of the participants’ making sense of phenomena under investigation and, at the same time, document the researcher’s sense making. The researcher thus moves between the emic and etic perspectives. The latter is achieved by looking at the data through a psychological lens, interpreting it with the application of psychological concepts and theories which the researcher finds helpful to illuminate the understanding of research problems.

Analysis

This was a multiphase process in which the first author immersed herself in the data and produced an initial analysis guided by IPA. The first author met 4 times (approximately 10 h total) with the second author, who had also read the included studies, to discuss translations and work toward shared understanding on essences as outlined by the IPA method [see Pietkiewicz and Smith (2014) for additional details]. For verification with the third and fourth authors, these authors purposefully did not read the original studies because the goal was to see if an “etic” eye would draw the same conclusions from the participants’ quotations and descriptions reported in this manuscript without reading the individual studies. For this phase of the process, the first author met with the third author for approximately the same amount of meetings and total hours to accomplish the shared understanding and verify the methodological steps used. Finally, the first author met twice with the fourth author (approximately 5 h) for final verification of themes agreed upon with second and third authors. During this process, we identified four new themes that capture the experience of minority youth during police encounters (Table 3).

Table 3 Results of translation: systematic animalistic dehumanization
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While immersing ourselves in the data and identifying these themes, we recognized that there was something deeper we were not capturing. We utilized methodological reduction—a recognized approach of phenomenological inquiry (Van Manen, 2011, para. 1). As Van Manen describes, the essence of methodological reduction is to “Bracket all established investigative methods or techniques and seek or invent an approach that seems to fit most appropriately the phenomenological topic under study.” We deepened our understanding of minority youth-police encounters by sifting the results through the theoretical lens of moral exclusion and dehumanization. In this way, the theoretical gaze emerged from the research rather than informing the research design.

Triangulation

Triangulation is an important aspect of QIMS. There are four different types of triangulation methods—method, theoretical perspective, sources, and analysts—used to reduce bias (Patton, 2002). Patton (1999) described triangulation as “a process by which the researcher can guard against the accusation that a study’s findings are simply an artifact of a single method, a single source, or a single investigator’s biases” (p. 1197). Bias reduction in QIMS is first achieved through the triangulation processes of the original studies; secondly, QIMS incorporates triangulation in the synthesis process (Aguirre & Bolton, 2013). In our study, we specifically used triangulation of sources and analysts. Data collected from 337 youths in five geographical locations met the criteria for triangulation of sources. Triangulation of analysts was achieved through our multiple meetings to immerse ourselves in the analysis process (described previously). This particularly strengthens the study given that two of the four authors represent the emic voice of minorities. During analyses, there were disagreements among authors. These disagreements were resolved through discussion in which each author’s interpretation was reviewed in light of the supporting data until agreement was reached.

Results

Analysis of the nine articles identified four themes that capture the experience of minority youth during police encounters: dangerous, controlling, prejudiced, and ineffective (Table 3). These are presented below with supporting participant narratives.

Police Encounters are Dangerous for Youth

Youth in all nine articles emphasized the danger of police encounters. Many recounted direct personal experiences of harassment, mistreatment, and physical assaults. For example, Slick, from Oakland, recalled his first incident of police brutality when he was 11 years old:

One time we were at St. Anthony’s [park]… the police out of nowhere started talking shit to me. And I uh, uh I pulled up my pants, I just pulled up my pants and he just grabbed me and slammed me on the ground and hit me with the club. He was like, he was like “Oh you look like you was gonna’ pull up your pants and do something.” I was, I was pullin’ up my pants ‘cause I be sagging my pants sometimes. (Rios, 2009, p. 157)

Slick was attempting to pull up his pants to show respect to the officer having previously been told by an officer to “not to sag my pants anymore so he wouldn’t have to think I was a criminal” (Rios, 2009, p. 157). Ed, from St. Louis, recalled the physical assault he sustained when an officer believed he was hiding drugs:

We were just sitting in the car and he walked up to the window and shined the flashlight in my face. I was like, “Get the flashlight out of my face.” I got out of the car and the cop was like, “You think I am a chump don’t you?” And he started choking me and was holding me yelling, “Spit it out! Spit it out!” I couldn’t breathe, so I couldn’t tell him “I’m not swallowing anything!” Finally, he let me go. (Brunson & Weitzer, 2009, p. 872)

Police Encounters Attempt to Control Youth

Seven of the nine sampled articles describe police encounters as controlling. First, youth describe policing as attempts to control their geographical movements, whether in terms of limiting their neighborhood movements or forcibly removing them from their neighborhoods to distant, sometimes unfamiliar, territory forcing them to find their way home (Brunson & Miller, 2006b). Shaun said, “They a trip, we be sitting on the front [porch] or something, they’ll pull up just ‘cause we sitting there. Or we be chillin’ in front of the store, [they] get out checking everybody” (Brunson & Miller, 2006a, p. 540). Some youth described being held for hours then released (Brunson & Miller, 2006b) while others, more seriously described being dropped by police in rival gang territory to make their way home. Nate said:

I know this one guy who went to my school and he was talkin’ ‘bout how he was in a gang and [officers] took him to one of his rivalry gangs and dropped him off on their block, right in the middle of it! [They] just told him to walk home. They took his shoes and socks and told him to walk home. (Brunson & Weitzer, 2009, p. 873)

Rios’ (2009) opening ethnographic description stresses the extraordinary amount of surveillance youth suffer in Oakland; youth in St. Louis describe police entry into their neighborhoods in terms that Brunson and colleagues interpret as besiegement (Brunson, 2007) and Chicago youth describe the hypervigilance of police in schools as well as neighborhoods (Sanchez & Adams, 2011).

Police are Prejudiced

Youth in all of the studies provided numerous examples of police prejudice that falls along three main axes: immigration status, race, and gender.

Immigration Status

Unsurprisingly, prejudiced policing based on perceived immigration status was a factor in the three of the four studies that included Latinos/as (Table 1). Lisa from Spanish Harlem reported:

Lots of these cops around here like to mock us Spanish people and they don’t like for us to be talking in Spanish. They always be telling people who have a hard time talking to them in English things like, “speak English, you’re in America now!” And then they want to be respected. (Solis, Portillos, & Brunson, 2009, p. 47)

Elena from Spanish Harlem said:

I’m Puerto Rican right, I live in Washington Heights, a lot of Dominicans live [there] too you know, we call it little Quisquella, cops around here have no problem throwing people up against walls, stores, cars, and even the floor. They always ask all us Spanish people, even me, now remember I’m Puerto Rican for some kind of [identification]. Why do I need to walk around all the time with some kind of [identification] like I’m some kind of illegal person?…they didn’t know who was American, who was Dominican or who was Puerto Rican. (Solis et al., 2009, p. 47)

Race

Racial prejudice was evident in youth police encounters especially those involving Black youth and predominantly Black neighborhoods. For example, many youth reported police use of derogatory language and racial slurs. Lorenz from St. Louis recalled:

…[Police] got us out of the car, check[ed] us and said he found some drugs in the car. And [the officers] said, “One of ya’ll goin’ with us.” [To decide] they said, “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, catch a nigga by his throat,” and locked up my friend because he was the oldest. (Gau & Brunson, 2010, p. 270)

Others connected the unethical behavior of police in their neighborhoods with racial prejudice. Lamont from St. Louis said:

[The police] they crooked. I mean they try to do anything [to you]. I ain’t tryin’ to be prejudice[d] but I think the police don’t like black people. You know like all the crooked cops always be in the ghettos, where all the black people are at and they try to get as many black people off the street as they can. (Brunson, 2007, p. 85)

Gender

Young men in the studies discussed prejudice from the police; however, they did not discuss this in relation to their gender. Only four studies included female participants (Table 1) and most describe differential treatment and concerns. Some testimonies by young women describe variations in treatment based on time of day and companions. For instance, young women reported being stopped after curfew (Brunson & Miller, 2006a) and described that being in the company of young men or insufficiently deferential to police officers increased their risk of maltreatment (Brunson & Miller 2006a). Also, young women reported a sexualized component to their police encounters and fears. For example, Lisa, from Spanish Harlem said:

…I don’t know who is worse. The criminals you are afraid of because you know they can hurt you but sometimes the cops you are afraid of too. The way they look at you as a female sometimes I feel they undress me with their eyes. So sometimes I fear both but, you know, differently. (Solis et al., 2009, p. 48)

Nykeshia from St. Louis spoke of a friend who had been sexually assaulted by police officers:

It was like three o’clock [a.m.] and the police was rollin’ past…Curfew had passed so they was gon’ lock her up and take her to juvenile. But they didn’t. Instead…they just drove out [to an isolated spot]…She [told me], ‘They held me down and did what they had to do, told me if I tell, they’ll get me and lock me up for real.’ And so she didn’t tell nobody but me. (Brunson & Miller 2006a, p. 546)

Police are Ineffective

Youth in six of the nine sample articles characterized the police as ineffective (Table 3). For example, Jose from New York said:

[The] police don’t care about my neighborhood. When you call them they take their sweet time [coming] and they come with [an] attitude. I bet if this was where those rich people lived, you know like on the east side, white and rich, they’d come real fast and would be real respectful. (Solis et al., 2009, p. 45)

Jamellah of St. Louis witnessed a woman being beaten and robbed. She called the police for help but said, “[They] ain’t never come…We waited like 30 min and they ain’t never show. So I waited at the bus stop with her…and she caught the bus home” (Brunson & Miller, 2006a, p. 543). Rennesha, also of St. Louis, reported that her parents called the police for help when a neighbor child came to them because her stepfather was beating her mother. She said, “The lil’ girl looked so sorry. But the police never did come” (Brunson & Miller, 2006a, p. 543).

Further Methodological Reduction: Youth-Police Encounters and Dehumanization

Methodological reduction is an acknowledged approach for phenomenological enquiry (Van Manen, 2011). The approach seeks deeper meaning of the phenomenon, looking for a balance between the concrete and universal aspects of the experiences captured by the text (Van Manen, 2011). The authors were struck by both the consistency of experiences among young minority men and women across geographical locations as well as by the insight of some youth of the moral matrix in which these encounters are embedded. Kyle from St. Louis said, “…if you grew up in a perfect neighborhood, the [police] treat you like you’re a human being” (Gau & Brunson, 2010, p. 267). From minority youth insights like this, a discussion of these experiences in the context of dehumanization and moral exclusion follows.

Dehumanization is perhaps most closely associated with intergroup conflict such as war and genocide. However, recent work proposes an integrative social-psychological model of dehumanization that places it firmly in the arena of everyday social interactions (Haslam, 2006). So while we may initially consider dehumanization too strong a descriptor of minority youth-police encounters, Haslam’s work (2006) broadens the possibility to examine policing encounters on the spectrum of dehumanization.

According to Haslam (2006), dehumanization is regularly deployed in representing and constructing racial and ethnic others (also see Jahoda, 1999). Frequently, “others” are likened to animals (such as apes) and as such depicted as less than human and instilled with concomitant qualities such as diminished cognitive capacity and criminality (Jahoda, 1999). For instance, Africans (and by extension, those with African ancestry) are likened to apes and immigrants to contaminating invaders (Jahoda, 1999). This construction of the “other” is reflected in the narratives of our sample. For example, Ed, a White youth from St. Louis said, “…I have heard White cops call my Black friends nigger and ‘boy’ like how they say ‘boy’ in the South” (Brunson & Weitzer, 2009, p. 869). Similarly, Tony from St. Louis was called a “black monkey” by a police officer (Brunson & Miller, 2006b, p. 627).

Kelman (1976) argued that dehumanization involves denying personal individuality and uniqueness. When divested of this individual agency, groups are easily morally excluded, thereby disinhibiting restraint on violence (Kelman, 1976). The ubiquitous complaints that residents are all treated as criminals regardless of context, history, symbols of affluence and legitimacy (Brunson & Miller, 2006a, b; Brunson & Weitzer, 2009; Gau & Brunson, 2010; Rios, 2009; Sanchez & Adams, 2011; Solis et al., 2009) are examples of Kelman’s de-individuation. Further, Latinas/os in Spanish Harlem described being lumped together by officers as by language, culture, and ethnicity (Solis et al., 2009) while Blacks in St. Louis described a similar lumping by officers based on skin color (Brunson & Miller, 2006a; Gau & Brunson, 2010). So while the rationale undergirding the moral exclusion is unique to the populations involved (as Solis et al., 2009 discuss), the exclusion, violence, othering, and demeaning language and treatment are remarkably similar.

Psychological distance—regarding others as less than human or enemies—and condescension (belittling, infantilizing, patronizing) both lie on the spectrum of moral exclusion (Opotow, 1990) and both are evident in the studies sampled. Minority youth describe police indifference or ineffectiveness regarding service and protection (Brunson, 2007; Brunson & Miller, 2006a, b; Carr et al. 2007; Sanchez and Adams, 2011; Solis et al., 2009). For instance, Slick from Oakland realized at 11 years old that the police would not protect him from local gangs and that police regarded him and other citizens as “the enemy” (Rios, 2009, p. 157).

Finally, those who lie in a zone of moral exclusion are at greater risk for violence, particularly legitimated forms of violence such as that described by youth in our sampled studies. Violence by officers described by youth varied in seriousness from harassment (Brunson, 2007, Brunson & Miller, 2006a, b; Brunson & Weitzer, 2009; Carr et al., 2007; Rios, 2009; Sanchez & Adams, 2011) to physical assault (Brunson & Miller, 2006a, b; Brunson & Weitzer, 2009; Rios, 2009; Sanchez & Adams, 2011).

Conclusions and Limitations

Minority youth experiences during police encounters are overwhelmingly negative. Results of this QIMS point to minority youths’ experiences as dangerous, controlling, and prejudiced. Further, youth experienced little in the way of service or protection. However, when reviewing the original themes from the individual studies (Table 2), these themes are obvious and expected. As noted, our immersion in the data, particularly the youths’ honest and raw interpretations of their experiences took us a step further, yielding the synergy expected in QIMS (Aguirre & Bolton, 2013). This synergistic understanding led us to identification of the deeper essence of their collective experiences—minority youth-police encounters represented in these studies were dehumanizing and morally excluding.

Understanding of this dehumanization and moral exclusion is critical given mounting pressure on law enforcement agencies to increase transparency and accountability in the aftermath of recent police shootings of unarmed youth such as Michael Brown and Tamir Rice. There are efforts to repair relationships, improve understanding, and reform police behavior. For instance, a curriculum for improving officer knowledge about disproportionate minority contact, youth behavior, and strategies for interaction was tested among 468 Connecticut police officers and was deemed effective (LaMotte et al., 2010). Improving public trust through transparency has become a federal priority as mentioned earlier.

The first-hand accounts of minority youth during involuntary police encounters helps contextualize the attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors of youth in contact with the law. Social work practitioners, community organizers and social justice researchers are intimately involved with these minority youth and much needs to be done to bring their oft overlooked voices to the fore and improve their neighborhood and school experiences. Highlighting both the paucity of experiential data and the richness of it may lead to further investigations in other parts of the country to increase our knowledge of minority youth-police encounters.

Limitations

It is important to note that the scarcity of minority youth voices in the scholarly literature is echoed by the scarcity of investigator voices. Brunson authored or co-authored two-thirds of our sample. He is first author on four papers, second author of one paper, and third author of a sixth paper (Table 1). There are three separate studies utilized for these five papers. Three papers (Brunson, 2007; Brunson & Miller, 2006a, b) resulted from a St. Louis study conducted between 1999 and 2000. The second study conducted between 2005 and 2006 in St. Louis produced two papers (Brunson & Weitzer, 2009; Gau & Brunson, 2010). The sixth article reports on a study conducted in New York City between 2000 and 2001 (Solis et al., S2009). This distinction is made apparent by Brunson and Weitzer (2009).

Implications for Social Work

Social workers often interact with minority youth in professional settings. This research offers social workers insight into the marginalization experienced by youth who come minority communities. They should be cognizant of these lived experiences in their interactions with minority youth. Additionally, often the role of the social worker is as an actor of the state, including child welfare workers, school social workers, and juvenile probation officers. Within these roles, social workers can use this research to advocate for changes in policy that reflect the concerns voiced by young people in the studies. Micro level changes in individual interactions with young people and macro level changes to local and state policies could have a positive impact on the experiences of youth who report being marginalized. This research informs social workers on their call to fight for social justice and equality and provides areas of opportunity for change.