juveniles' Attitudes Toward the Police 45Leiber et al. found that juveniles' attitudes toward the police are not a direct result
of police-juvenile contacts. In fact, many sociocultural factors are directly related
to young people's perceptions of the police. Commitment to delinquent norms was
found to be a significant predictor of negative attitudes toward the police. Race and
ethnicity predicted most strongly juveniles' perceptions of police discrimination
and police fairness, and minority youths tended to have more negative perceptions
of the police than Caucasians. These results indicate that young people's image of
the police are a direct result of their sociocultural upbringing and that in many
communities the negative view of law enforcement is so much a way of life that
youths may develop resistance toward the police without ever having had contact
with them. This finding is also supported by a 1995 study conducted in Britain,
which found that a relationship existed between the attitudes of children and adults
living in the same household toward the police (Mating, 1995). This suggests the
difficulty inherent in attempting to change negative views ot police, social control,
and the law. Many youths are taught to have disrespect for the law itself, and police
are the most visible representatives of the legal system.
In a 1993 study on the attitudes oi Aboriginal school children in Australia
toward institutional authorities, researchers Ken Rigby and Dasia Black sought to
investigate a previously found notion in non-Aboriginal children of their attitudes
toward authority. Other researchers have found that Australian children have a
generalized attitude toward institutional authorities that extends to a number of
different individuals including both parents and the police (Rigby & Densley, 1986:
Rigby, Mak, & Slee, 1989; Rigby, Schofield, & Slee, 1987; Rigby & Slee. 1987,
all as cited in Rigby & Black, 1993). These studies further report that juveniles
tend to have generally positive attitudes toward institutional authorities, although
these studies did not include any Aboriginal youth. In Rigby and Black's 1993
study, they found that Aboriginal youth's feelings about parental authority were not
generalizable to nonparental institutional authorities such as the police. In fact, the
Aboriginal youths had much less positive attitudes toward the police. The researchers
state that this finding is related to the conflict between the Aboriginal people and
the White police. Many of the children in the study had actually witnessed such
conflict and others had been informed of the strife by older Aboriginals or their
peers. This finding is similar to that of Waddington and Braddock (1991), who
found that in Britain adolescent boys either saw the police as officers of order or
bullies and when divided into the racial groups of Asian, Black, or White, their
attitudes differed. Individuals in the White and Asian groups saw police in both
ways, whereas the vast majority of the Black sample regarded police as bullies.
Changing juveniles' negative perceptions of the police requires making contact
with those youths who harbor resentment toward the law. Because these views
are usually a result of their community's influence, it is unlikely that any headway
would be made in attempting to go into neighborhoods and make a positive impact
on young people. Instead, intervening at the school level would allow police an
opportunity to make a positive impact on the lives of those children who may