44 2 Police and Law Enforcement—-Juvenile Forensics
live on his own and make his own decisions. He states that the police are "out to get him"
and that all they want to do is "ruin people's lives." Devon cannot remember a positive
interaction with the police and reports that his first memory of police involvement was
before the age of 3. He remembers being frightened and hiding under his bed while his
parents screamed and broke things in the house. After what seemed like hours of loud
noises, pushing, and hitting, he recalls two police officers dragging his father from his
home, leaving his mother in a state of panic. Devon remembers watching his mother's
pain and hating the men who took away the man they loved. They had stripped her of
a husband and Devon of a father.
Two years later Devon learned ot the police's desire to take anything that he valued
from him by placing him in foster care. He will never forget the afternoon he was taken
from bis own home and forced to live with strangers in a house filled with other children
he did not know. Devon was told that he had to live with these people because his mother
did drugs and was not taking good care of him. Devon knew that things were crazy at
home, but that was where his family lived. What would he do without his brothers?
Where were they? He hated this new place and the new people. They would not let
him see his family, the only people he knew. He blamed the police for ruining his life
by taking his family from him. Now he understood why his mother always spoke so
negatively of these people who were supposed to make things better.Literature Review
Although attitudes toward law enforcement and social control have been studied
quite extensively over the past few decades, researchers have focused primarily on
the perceptions of adults. The fact that juveniles might have an entirely different
set of attitudes and opinions, which also may have their own etiology, has been
only minimally examined. However, the interaction between juveniles and the
police is certainly not a recent phenomenon and does not seem to be disappearing.
In fact, young people's perceptions of the police have become so important that
interventions such as Police—Schools Liasons, where a police officer becomes an
integral part of the children's lives in a particular school, are being introduced to
change children's attitudes toward law enforcement. Interventions such as these
indicate that young people tend to have a negative view of police, and in order to
effectively alter their perception the etiology of these attitudes must be understood.
Unfortunately, many studies of juveniles' attitudes toward the police conducted
in years past have been limited by the assumption that these attitudes are primar-
ily a result of personal interaction with the police (Leiber, Nalla, & Farnworth,
1998). However, as investigators have become more interested in examining nu-
merous possible influences, it becomes apparent that there are many factors which
contribute to these beliefs. For example, Leiber et al. (1998) conducted a study
which proposed that attitudes toward the police develop as a result of the socio-
cultural context of which children are a part. They specifically hypothesized that
young people's attitudes "develop as a function of socialization in their communi-
ties' social environment, of their deviant subcultural 'preferences,' and of the prior
effect of these sociocultural factors on juveniles' contacts with the police" (p. 151).