Police officers’ implicit theories of youth offending

Introduction

Police culture commonly involves police holding unfavourable views of citizens, and an ‘us and them’ mentality (Chan, 1997; Paoline & Terrill, 2005). While the relationship(s) between police culture and police attitudes or beliefs (i.e. between the collective and the individual) may be difficult to demarcate (Crank, 2004), policing occupational culture can inform and support the stereotyping of particular groups in the community, as Chan’s (1997) work on policing in the Australian context illustrates. Furthermore, police attitudes (i.e. alignment with a dominant police culture) can influence police behaviours (Paoline & Terrill, 2005). Understanding the way(s) police ‘think’ (Reiner, 2010; Souhami, 2007, p. 81) – and especially, how they think about (alleged) offenders – is therefore vital. This is particularly critical in relation to young people, over whom police exercise enormous discretion, and in relation to whom police attitudes have been found to inform decision-making (Marinos & Innocenti, 2008; McAra & McVie, 2005).

In general terms, the very limited research indicates that police view young people as lacking morals, values and respect for authority figures (Bolzan, 2003; Drury & Dennison, 2002; White, 1992). Police identify certain groups of young people, such as homeless and Indigenous young people (White, 1992), ethnic minority young people (Rabois & Haaga, 2002) and young women, as particularly problematic. For example, in Bolzan’s (2003, p. 52) study, police singled out young teenage girls as ‘real bitches’. Drury and Dennison (2002, p. 70) likewise found that while police perceived young men to be the most poorly behaved overall, they characterised young women as more argumentative than boys – or in one officer’s words, ‘far more mouthy and noisy’.

Police adopt a range of explanations for what they consider young people’s negative traits, typically considering such traits as resulting from poor parenting and/or familial and social disintegration (Bolzan, 2003; White, 1992). There have been even fewer studies that have examined more specifically police implicit theories (ITs), or the ‘lay theories that individuals develop … in order to understand and explain their social world’ (Mann & Hollin, 2007, p. 8; see further McCartan, 2010; Ó Ciardha & Gannon, 2012). Indeed, only two studies of police ITs could be located by a thorough search of relevant social science databases: Cicourel (1968) and Westley (1970).

Cicourel’s (1968) ethnographic study of two police and probation departments in California found that police and probation officers ascribe a range of explanations to youth offending. For example, in the case of one young person, explanations varied from ‘[he] had a problem’ to ‘[he] just needs a boot in the ass’ (Cicourel, 1968, p. 259). Cicourel’s (1968) work provides an insight into police ITs in relation to individual offenders rather than offenders as a group.

In contrast, Westley’s (1970, pp. 65–67) case study of an (unnamed) urban police station in America involved asking police the question ‘What kind of person is a criminal?’ Officers’ responses revealed a wide range of ITs among police:

They suggested that criminals ‘were kicked around as children’ (poor family socialization theory); that criminals ‘got involved with a bunch of punks’ (differential association theory); that criminals did ‘not belong to any church or any other organization or have anyone to tell them what the truth is’ (social disorganization theory) … [and] … that they were ‘uneducated, unintelligent, drunkards and mental’. (versions of personality and biological pathology theories) (Box, 1981, pp. 170–171)

This study begins to address this gap by presenting an analysis of the ITs that police hold about youth offending in particular. The larger study for which police were interviewed (Cross, Dwyer, & Richards, 2015) sought to document the youth crime prevention impacts of Police–Citizens Youth Clubs (PCYCs) in Queensland, Australia. In discussing this broader topic, police interviewed for the study provided rich insights into their ITs of youth offending and how youth crime should be addressed. Based on a thematic analysis of the interviews undertaken with police (n = 41) for the larger study, this article argues that police participants’ overriding ITs of youth offending align closely with social control theory (SCT).

Social control theory

There are links between explicit and ITs, with individuals’ ITs both shaped by, and shaping, media representations and professional knowledge (Box, 1981; Hardiker & Webb, 1979; McCartan, 2010). The explicit theory that forms the analytical framework of the current study is SCT. The central premise of SCT reflects the Hobbesian view of human nature: that humans are inherently self-interested and will commit crime if not sufficiently constrained (Hirschi, 1969). In contrast to most theories, which ask why people commit crime (Hirschi, 1986; Kornhauser, 1978), it put forward a theory about what prevents individuals from doing so (Hirschi, 1969, 1986). Building on Toby’s (1957) concept of ‘stakes in conformity’, Hirschi (1969) argued that individuals are less likely to choose to offend if they have an investment in conventional society. Conversely, individuals may turn to crime if their bonds with society are weak or broken (Hirschi, 1969). Hirschi (1969) identified four ways in which individuals develop and maintain a significant investment in conventional society: attachment, commitment, involvement and belief (see Kornhauser, 1978).

Attachment refers to the development of affection, respect and/or sensitivity towards others, including the opinions of others (Han, Kim, & Lee, 2016; Hirschi, 1969): ‘to the extent that a person is not sensitive to the thoughts, feelings and expectations of conventional others, i.e. not attached, then the person remains free to deviate’ (Box, 1981, p. 123). Commitment refers to a person’s adherence to conventional social goals such as educational or career achievement:

The person invests time, energy, himself, in a certain line of activity – say, getting an education …. Whenever he considers deviant behavior, he must consider the cost of this deviant behavior, the risk he runs of losing the investment he has made in conventional behavior. (Hirschi, 1969, p. 20)

According to SCT, these four elements of social bonding need to be instilled in young people in particular in order to prevent crime (Donner, Maskaly, & Fridell, 2016; Han et al., 2016; Hirschi, 1969). Thus, SCT posits both an explanation of youth offending (i.e. their social bonds are broken) and what ought to be done about it (i.e. enhance young people’s social bonds via attachment, commitment, involvement and belief). Although SCT was to some extent abandoned in Hirschi’s later work (Taylor, 2001), it has found ‘modest empirical support’ (Donner et al., 2016, p. 418; Schinkel, 2002). This article does not ‘test’ or evaluate the ‘proper’ understanding of youth offending, but rather uses the ITs framework to elucidate the underlying assumptions held by police concerning the causes of youth offending and responses to it.

Methodology

The research project from which this article stems documented the youth crime prevention impacts of PCYCs in Queensland, Australia. The project was approved by Queensland University of Technology Human Research Ethics Committee (approval #1300000402) and the Queensland Police Service’s Research Committee. PCYCs are community-based clubs that provide programmes and activities to local communities, with the aims of enhancing youth development and fostering crime prevention and community safety (Western Australia Police and Community Youth Centres, 2015). PCYCs exist in most Australian states and territories; there are currently 54 clubs in Queensland alone (QPCYWA, 2015). While any member of the community can access PCYCs, Queensland clubs are located predominantly in low socioeconomic communities, and four are located in remote Indigenous communities. PCYCs thus explicitly aim to ‘get to the kids before the kids get to the police station’ (www.pcyc.org.au/about-pcyc/index.php). To meet these aims, PCYCs provide a wide range of sporting, leisure, cultural and welfare activities and programs, with many focused specifically on reducing youth offending (Queensland Police-Citizens Youth Welfare Association [QPCYWA], 2015). Each PCYC is managed by a Branch Manager, who is a fully operational member of the Queensland Police Service (QPS) provided by the QPS on an in-kind basis.

A qualitative case study approach was adopted for the research. Semi-structured interviews were conducted across five separate sites:

the annual QPCYWA state conference (QPCYWA is the governing organisation for PCYCs in Queensland);

At each of the case study locations, interviews were undertaken with a range of participants: PCYC staff and volunteers, stakeholders, parents and young people involved in PCYCs, and members of the QPS. In total, 152 participants were interviewed. This included 41 police (28 Branch Managers or Assistant/Acting Branch Managers of PCYCs, and 13 others, including general duties officers, Officers in Charge of police stations, and crime prevention or training officers). In order to maintain the confidentiality of participants, this article refers to all Branch Managers simply as ‘Branch Managers’, and all other police participants as ‘Other’.

Police interviewed for this research cannot be considered representative of all members of the QPS or of police in other jurisdictions. A key question is the extent to which the views of police working in PCYCs may differ from those of other, ‘mainstream’, police. While it might be assumed that police attracted to PCYC roles have different views about young people from other police, a number of points can be made to counter this argument. First, while some police interviewed for the study were motivated to work in PCYCs, others described being moved into PCYC roles against their will, and/or with little knowledge of PCYCs. Second, while some Branch Managers had spent a large proportion of their policing careers in PCYC roles, others had moved back and forth between PCYCs and mainstream policing roles over long periods, or had comparatively recently moved to a PCYC after long careers in other policing areas. Finally, these officers ‘are still police officers, and will therefore still embody at least some of the understandings and practices characteristic of their profession’ (Drury & Dennison, 2002, p. 67). Nonetheless, care has been taken in this article to present the views of the mainstream police included in the sample. Police were recruited into the study in one of two ways. First, the research team gave a presentation at an annual QPCYWA conference, at which the vast majority of Branch Managers in Queensland, and other police involved in related roles were present. Police were invited to participate in an individual, face-to-face interview in a private location such as a meeting room. Second, in each of the case study sites, local police (i.e. not Branch Managers) were approached via email and invited to participate, either based on existing contact with the research team or their involvement with the local PCYC. The vast majority of police interviews were conducted in person with a member of the research team. In a small number of cases, due to practicalities, interviews were conducted via telephone.

A semi-structured interview schedule was designed for each participant group (see Cross, Dwyer, & Richards, 2015 for the interview schedules). While the questions asked of participant groups varied, generally they sought to elicit participants’ views on the effectiveness of PCYCs in meeting PCYCs’ youth crime prevention aims. For example, police were asked: ‘What do you think is the value of PCYC for young people?’ and ‘How do PCYCs meet their objective of preventing crime?’. Interviews lasted approximately one hour. Police participants’ length of service ranged from 1 year to 35 years, with an average of approximately 22 years.

Most interviews were audio-recorded with permission and then transcribed verbatim. In a small number of cases, handwritten notes were taken in place of an audio-recording. These were subsequently typed into Microsoft Word documents. All transcripts were de-identified and entered into an NVIVO database. Prior to coding, these were read through numerous times by the author as part of the process of undertaking the larger study (Cross, Dwyer, & Richards, 2015). As Caulfield and Hill (2014, p. 180) argue, this process of familiarisation is essential when undertaking thematic analysis in order to avoid superficial analyses.

A process of deductive coding was then undertaken. This involves undertaking detailed readings of the data according to pre-determined themes (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005) – in this case, the categories of attachment, commitment, involvement and belief. Following this, a more finely grained coding process was undertaken, in which subcategories in each of these broader categories were identified.

Finally, a thematic analysis was undertaken. This involves ‘identifying, analysing and reporting patterns (themes) within data’ (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 79). This approach to data analysis is appropriate for research that aims to ‘explore the views, perceptions and/or experiences of groups or individuals, and any differences or similarities in these’ (Caulfield & Hill, 2014, p. 183). Analysis focused on the twin concerns of the causes and responses to youth crime arising from police ITs.

Following Mason (2002), care has been taken to give readers a sense of how frequently particular themes appeared in the dataset. Furthermore, the analytic framework of SCT has been applied critically; care was taken not to force the interview data to fit this framework. As can be seen from the findings, some elements of SCT are more clearly reflected in the police interviews than others. This does not detract from the argument being made, but instead should be considered a type of ‘negative case analysis’ or ‘disconfirming evidence’ (Creswell & Miller, 2000, p. 127).

Police ITs of youth offending

Having outlined the broad nature of the research, its institutional context and the analytical framework and method, this section examines the evidence of the extent to which the ITs framework is an effective heuristic tool for understanding police views about the causes and responses to youth offending. The four elements of SCT are discussed in descending order based on identified strength of evidence of police views.

Discussion

Police ITs about the causes of and preferred responses to youth offending reflect both the broad premise of SCT – that young people would inevitably offend if left to their own devices – and, to varying extents, the individual tenets of SCT. Interestingly, police ITs largely reflected SCT in its original formation. While it was later merged with theories of self-control (Hirschi, 2004; Hirschi & Gottfredson, 2000; Taylor, 2001), discourses of young people lacking self-control or requiring support to maintain self-control were almost absent from the interviews undertaken for the current research. Furthermore, while the tenet of belief was subsequently abandoned by Hirschi (Taylor, 2001), police in the current study adhered strongly to it. A number of interrelated implications stem from these findings.

A key limitation of SCT is that it de-emphasises the historico-political and socio-structural determinants of crime (Hirschi, 1986; Schinkel, 2002). Certainly, SCT can be criticised for decontextualising and homogenising youth offending, and paying scant regard to the diverse antecedents of youth crime. For example, it has been well documented that historical, political, social and structural forces are key to understanding the offending of Indigenous young people. In Australia, Indigenous young people are dramatically overrepresented at every stage of the criminal justice process (White, 2015). Conceptualising youth offending in line with SCT (i.e. that young people simply need to participate in conventional activities, develop conventional goals, form attachments with conventional others and accept the legitimacy of police) minimises the influence that a raft of racist government policies (e.g. the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families) has undoubtedly had on the offending of Indigenous young people (Cunneen, White, & Richards, 2015). These examples problematise the very notion of ‘conventionality’, which is undoubtedly an expression of hegemonic cultural norms such as whiteness. While SCT espouses the importance of ‘conventional others’ such as parents and family, Indigenous child-rearing practices that differ from the white norm are often delegitimated and considered to fall short of the white ‘standard’ (Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care, 2011). The focus of SCT on ‘conventionality’, and police adherence to this concept, might be considered problematic on these grounds. This speaks to the assumption of SCT, reflected in police ITs, that young people strive for conventionality, and share a value system with mainstream society (Schinkel, 2002). As ethnographic research has found, however, such a view fails to appreciate young people’s resistance to these ‘shared’ values, and their preference for ‘street time’ or other ‘unconventional’ pastimes (Corrigan, 1979; Ilan, 2010).

Police interviews simultaneously demonstrated a strong commitment to the central premise of SCT – that young people will inevitably offend if left to their own devices. This appears to present a contradiction: police see young people as both striving for conventionality and as destined to offend. This apparent paradox goes to the heart of police views: it highlights the dominant police view that young people desire conventionality but do not possess the resources required to achieve it without the involvement of police and other authorities.

Moreover, police narratives, reflecting SCT, eschew any consideration of young people’s motivations to offend; it is simply assumed that all young people will be sufficiently motivated to offend in the absence of effective social bonds. SCT has been criticised for failing to consider variance in motivation, and thus failure to explain differential rates of offending across different social groups (Hirschi, 1986; Kornhauser, 1978; Taylor, 2001). Police in the sample likewise largely failed to consider young people’s motivations to offend, and instead positioned all young people as potential offenders. While this may reflect the sample composition of the study as noted above, it also reflects the broader cultural phenomenon of constructing children as projects rather than beings, based on the assumption that ‘children do not simply grow into adults, but have to be worked on, actively and consciously’ (Ericsson & Larsen, 2002, p. 101). This phenomenon, which involves children and young people being increasingly ‘managed’ by parents and other adults and having their non-school hours increasingly filled with conventional structured activities, has been documented in the sociological and psychological literature (Luthar & Latendresse, 2005). Parents’ motivations for limiting their children’s free time may be quite separate from police motivations; nonetheless, in both instances, the notion that young people may simply ‘hang out’, spending free time with friends, ‘doing nothing’ (Corrigan, 1979, p. 119), is rendered problematic or dangerous. Importantly, police in the current study perceived young people’s unstructured and unsupervised use of free time as problematic in and of itself not necessarily because they always imagined it as a precursor to crime.

The twin ITs of police in this regard – that young people will inevitably offend, and that boredom fosters offending lend one another (false) legitimacy. The strategy of ‘boredom busting’ within which police ITs are firmly embedded would not make sense if young people were not conceptualised as inevitable offenders. This conceptualisation is troubling, as while most young people offend at some time, they do not do so seriously or persistently. Indeed, it has been well established that most young people grow out of crime (Richards & Lee, 2013), and that a small cohort of young people is responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime (Skardhamar, 2009). The approach of taking up young people’s time is therefore limited at best.

The concomitant adherence of police to the SCT tenet of ‘involvement’ is problematic on two main grounds. First, it can serve to deny young people the opportunity to develop autonomy, identity and life skills beyond the reach of institutions. While these institutions are undoubtedly important components of youth development, it may also be in young people’s best interests for them to learn life skills autonomously and experientially – away from the institutional gaze. More generally, the broad police mandate with respect to young people dictated by police ITs undoubtedly collides with developmentally healthy youth assertions of autonomy, such as the value that young people place on ‘hanging out’ with friends, so as to potentially undermine youth perceptions of police legitimacy.

Second, while police posit ‘involvement’ as the preferred response to the ‘problem’ of young people ‘roaming the street’ (Participant 36, Branch Manager), it must be recognised that spending time in public is an activity more frequently undertaken by certain groups of young people such as Indigenous young people. Furthermore, these young people are more visible to police when they do so (Cunneen et al., 2015). Police officers’ uncritical adherence to ‘involvement’ as a panacea for youth offending might therefore legitimise unnecessary or even discriminatory intervention into the lives of particularly marginalised groups of young people. As McAra and McVie (2010) have documented, this often serves to entrench young people into ongoing contact with the criminal justice system.

Police officers’ strong support for the tenet of ‘belief’ is concerning on similar grounds. In this study, police expressed concern that young people think poorly of them and a concomitant desire for young people to trust the police and to accept their legitimacy. While this is a laudable aim, it is again premised on a homogenised construction of young people that fails to acknowledge histories of discriminatory policing that impede some young people’s acceptance of police legitimacy. Police involvement in the removal of Aboriginal children, among myriad other examples of devastating police involvement in Indigenous communities, has resulted in Indigenous communities having poor perceptions of the police (Harvey, 2012). Indigenous young people may thus not ‘believe’ in the legitimacy of police with good reason. While it is commendable that police, particularly those who work most closely with young people, seek to build relationships of trust with young people, such work should involve an understanding of and commitment to addressing historical and contemporary contexts of injustice.

Another striking feature of the police interviews was the lack of attention afforded to issues of gender. Previous research (Bolzan, 2003; Drury & Dennison, 2002) has noted, at least in passing, that police hold particular views of young women, typically seeing them as more challenging to deal with and more argumentative than young men. Such views were, however, noticeably absent in the current study. Indeed, police for the most part constructed a ‘genderless’ young person. This is especially striking given that young women’s contact with police has increased significantly in recent years (Carrington, 2013). Drury and Dennison (2002) noted in their study that police discussed an abstract young person devoid of race, class or gender until more specifically queried on these dimensions. While the current study is unable to provide insights into how police ITs of young people may vary according to gender, this suggests that a more deliberate focus on this aspect of police views would be fruitful in future research.

Finally, police adherence to SCT demonstrates the pervasiveness of understandings of crime developed in the Global North. The problem of youth offending in Australia is culturally and historically specific – utterly embedded in Australia’s history of colonisation (White, 2015). In this context, an implicit adherence to SCT provides an example of a criminological theory developed in and specific to the Global North successfully representing itself as ‘universal, timeless and placeless’ (Carrington, Hogg, & Sozzo, 2016, p. 1). The continued problem of Indigenous young people’s ‘hyperincarceration’ (White, 2015) in Australia suggests the need to consider localised and culturally relevant understandings of and responses to youth offending. Thus, while the analysis presented above demonstrates the interaction between implicit and explicit theories (Box, 1981; Furnham & Henderson, 1983; McCartan, 2010), it simultaneously problematises this phenomenon and suggests the need for bottom-up, localised and contextualised explanations for youth offending in an increasingly globalised world.

Conclusion

Research on police culture and attitudes shows that police can hold stereotypical views of a range of groups in the community. However, very little has been documented about police views of youth offending using the more finely grained lens of ITs. This article begins to address this gap by demonstrating that police ITs of youth offending reflect SCT. In doing so, it provides an original insight into an important but under-researched topic. It demonstrates a disconnection between police ITs and the realities of youth offending in the Australian context. This key finding suggests that police training ought to better capture the contextualised realities of young people’s offending, and that forms of policing that are embedded within localised, contextual understandings of youth crime (such as Aboriginal Community Night Patrols (Porter, 2016)) might be afforded greater attention (see also Thurau, 2009). As Thurau (2009) has argued, education for police that informs officers about adolescent development and the aetiology of offending behaviour by young people will likely improve not just police perceptions of young people, but interactions between police and young people. Moreover, research clearly shows that both formal and informal police training that targets officers’ knowledge of and attitudes towards young people can have significant impacts (LaMotte et al., 2010; Schulenberg & Warren, 2009). However, police resistance to training initiatives that challenge their worldviews has been well documented (Chan, 1997), as has police reluctance to accept training from civilians or outsiders (Tallon, Spadafore, & Labriola, 2016). Training delivered ‘by police, for police’, and training that emphasises the utility of the message to officers’ daily working lives may therefore be the most effective (Tallon et al., 2016). Given the limits to how much training police officers can realistically be expected to complete, training of this nature could be targeted specifically at those whose role is primarily geared towards young people and/or crime prevention (see Jamieson, Suren, & Knapp, 2000; Marinos & Innocente, 2008).

A final point is that more qualitative research – indeed, more research in general – is needed to further elucidate police ITs of youth offending. A key question is whether the ITs identified in this article are reflective of those of police more broadly. The ITs identified in this article may reflect the specific occupational culture (or subculture (Reiner, 2010)) or the cohort of police interviewed. While this is important to note, it need not detract from the relevance of the findings. As Drury and Dennison (2002, p. 67) have argued, when examining police views about youth offending, it makes sense to consider those police who have most contact with young people. A related question for future research is whether police ITs accord with established criminological theories other than (or in addition to) SCT. Research utilising large, generalisable samples will be able to best address these questions and make a vital contribution to our understanding of this important topic.