A growing body of research has begun to examine the implications of police contact for youth. Largely emphasizing serious police contact (arrest, court involvement, and incarceration), this scholarship has generally found that police contact is associated with negative health and educational outcomes. In this study, we build on this work by examining the implications of direct and vicarious police contact for youth attitudes towards the future, both generally and with respect to graduating college. Using multivariate regression models that incorporated a wide range of control variables and data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, we found that youth who experienced police stops without an arrest were less optimistic in general and with respect to college graduation. We found the same for youth who experienced vicarious police contact, but for youth who experienced arrest we only found a significant reduction in optimism with respect to college graduation. Therefore, based on our findings and prior scholarship, we argue that social workers should push policymakers to move beyond the status quo and to make significant changes to how they go about promoting public safety.

越来越多的研究开始探讨警察接触对青少年的影响。该奖学金主要强调严重的警察接触（逮捕、法庭介入和监禁），普遍发现警察接触与负面的健康和教育结果相关。在这项研究中，我们在这项工作的基础上，研究了直接和间接警察接触对年轻人对未来的态度的影响，无论是一般还是大学毕业。使用包含广泛控制变量和来自脆弱家庭和儿童福祉研究的数据的多元回归模型，我们发现经历过警察拦截但没​​有被捕的青少年总体上对大学毕业不太乐观。我们发现，对于经历过警察间接接触的年轻人来说，情况也是如此，但对于经历过逮捕的年轻人来说，我们只发现他们对大学毕业的乐观情绪显着下降。因此，根据我们的研究结果和之前的学术研究，我们认为社会工作者应该推动政策制定者超越现状，并对他们促进公共安全的方式做出重大改变。