Reducing the disproportionate policing of Black children

Policing in England and Wales has long been criticised for its disproportionate treatment of people of colour, particularly Black people. Communities of colour assert they are over-policed and under-protected – treated as suspects first rather than needing protection from crime and violence.

The shocking 2020 strip-search of 13-year-old Child Q by police at her Hackney school and subsequent national outrage highlighted the ways Black children have long been subject to disproportionate policing at the hands of UK police, including strip-searches and stop-and-searches.

Research suggests this is driven by police ‘adultification’ of Black children – treating children as adults, ie more grown up, less innocent and less vulnerable than their age. Adultification leads police to negatively stereotype Black children assigning them adult motivations and characteristics, which generates disproportionate policing outcomes.

This has garnered national attention, with the Independent Office of Police Conduct’s November 2024 report on race discrimination calling for police to better safeguard against this view.

Such disproportionate policing further erodes negative views within many communities of colour of police legitimacy and trustworthiness. Many people from marginalised groups, including racial and ethnic minorities, women and those from lower-status socioeconomic neighbourhoods in the UK, US and other jurisdictions, have long viewed police in a less positive light than their majority group counterparts.

This is driven by historic and ongoing perceptions of being over-policed and under-protected, police racism, racial profiling, civilian deaths, and disproportionate policing outcomes such as stop-and-searches and strip-searches of children.

Poor police legitimacy in communities not only alienates the service, but also means communities are less inclined to co-operate with police, provide witness statements, or call police in an emergency.

My research suggests that increased police diversity can have a role to play in reducing negative stereotypes – and ultimately disproportionate policing – of Black children in England and Wales by applying the well-established theory of representative bureaucracy.

Representative bureaucracy

Representative bureaucracy theory comes from public administration and political science, but my book applies it robustly to police diversity scholarship.

I argue that historically under-represented officers like people of colour, women, LGBTQ+ and others can experience and conduct policing practice in ways different from their majority group peers under the right circumstances.

While the mere presence of greater diversity in a public institution where the composition of the institution mirrors that of the community – passive bureaucratic representation – can have positive effects for citizens in making public institutions seem more fair and legitimate, more is required to actually change outcomes.

Active bureaucratic representation occurs when historically under-represented civil servants consciously or unconsciously take an interest in ensuring that the institutional policies and practices benefit their communities of origin, either at group or individual levels.

I argue that if police officers are sufficiently empowered to do this through individual self-identification, opportunities to use their discretion in this way, and seeing themselves as part of their communities of origin, they can police in different and sometimes less biased ways.

This can mean that because of their own lived experiences as Black children, they will not stereotype Black children and will police accordingly, rejecting notions of adultification.

Not all minority officers might hold these non-stereotyping views, feel part of their communities of origin, or feel empowered to do this. But this theory does help us understand why, in an increasing number of studies I highlight in my book, minority group officers generate different policing outcomes from their majority group peers for practices like stop-and-searches, arrests, uses of force and traffic stops.

Minority police officers

Even if minority officers hold non-stereotyping beliefs, it does not mean they always act in non-stereotyping ways.

I interviewed leading minority police leaders and analysed hundreds of studies about officers from backgrounds traditionally under-represented in policing – including officers of colour, women, LGBTQ+ and those with college educations – to better understand their experiences of policing.

I found that officers from traditionally marginalised backgrounds face extreme pressures on the job. Not only do they experience racism, sexism, homophobia and other biases from their colleagues and bosses, but they can also experience internal, deeply personal conflicts about upholding a biased street police culture that negatively regards people who look like them or come from backgrounds like theirs.

This makes them outsiders to some within the police services, with the result that they often have to work harder and longer than their colleagues to get recognition or promotion.

They also often face more harassment, greater levels of internal discipline and more terminations than their majority group colleagues, and more often voluntarily leave the service.

Officers from minority groups also have to contend with navigating the challenges of street police culture in their institutions. While police organisations can have multiple cultures – those for street officers, mid-level supervisors and senior leaders – it is a street police culture that remains particularly influential on police across many different roles.

All officers are introduced to this culture in the police academy, and all serve in the street police role at some point in their careers. Officers of all backgrounds are explicitly and implicitly pressured to conform to street police culture institutional norms, which also set unwritten expectations of the job.

But street police culture has some troubling characteristics, including aggression, violence, escalation, distance from police communities and all sorts of biases – racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism and more – that propel disproportionate policing. And so institutionally embedded are these street police culture norms that they are very difficult to change.

For minority officers who may reject these cultural biases, or want to resist adultifying children of colour, they face a dilemma: conform to street police culture norms and ‘fit in’ with colleagues, or build trust relationships with their communities of origin, represent the interests of those communities, be more culturally sensitive, and avoid engaging in biased policing practices.

My research and that of others show that rejecting street police culture can have significant consequences for minority group officers – from alienation or shunning by other officers, to lack of job progression, less favourable assignments, and threats to personal safety on the job.

My book does not argue that increasing police diversity is a panacea for all that ails policing – far from it. Many internal institutional changes are needed, including changing the troubling characteristics of street police culture, independent accountability mechanisms, American-style court-ordered consent decrees and judicial oversight of police services, and changing the allocation of police resources to include more non-police-led public-health interventions for social ills.

But better understanding the complexities of the lived experiences of diverse police officers, and considering how these might lead them to police in different ways to their majority group peers, holds the potential to mitigate the extremely negative consequences of the disproportionate policing of children of colour, particularly Black children.

This article first appeared on Transforming Society, and is republished under a Creative Commons Licence; you can read the original here.

Picture © track5 / iStockphoto