Perceptions and attitudes toward police among justice-involved youths’ parents: a scoping review

Within the family unit, parents are not only providers of basic needs but also the primary socializers, influencing how children come to view themselves, others and the world around them (Allport, 1954). A vast body of developmental psychological literature has established that parents transmit values, norms and attitudes that children often internalize, guiding how they respond to social contexts, including how they perceive authority figures like the police (Esenberg and Musssen, 1997). In this context, what parents convey to their youths is of utmost importance, and it is also important that we understand what factors affect parental perceptions of police. This is especially so, in the review context of justice-involved youths, who in some senses are mixed up in the legal system and facing a potentially negative trajectory perception-wise.

Research on how parents and youths reason about police is often placed in the conceptual focus of police legitimacy and procedural justice theory, but there are also very specific terms and frameworks used to understand this particular conversation. For instance, a range of studies examine whether parents have “the talk” with their youths about police interaction. The “talk” is pretty much indistinguishable from one significant demographic factor, that of ethnicity. The talk is a form of protective guidance given by ethnic minority parents, aimed at ensuring the safety of their children by informing them of, for instance, matters such as racial profiling (Whitaker and Snell, 2016) and generally teaching them how to navigate systemic discrimination and avoid escalating police encounters. Indeed, Fine and Del Toro (2022) found that ethnic minority parents more often discuss police with their youths, and a clear rationale for doing so is that these parents “prepare” their youths to navigate systematic discrimination (Peck et al., 2014). Given the long history of police brutality against underserved communities with high density of immigrants, it is not surprising that this particular strand of research is characterized by its distinct focus on ethnicity and race. The recent high-profile killings of Black citizens in the United States, such as George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, have further magnified these concerns, bringing heightened attention to the lived realities of systemic discrimination sparked significant public outrage (Williamson et al., 2018). As these critical events unfold, it is no surprise either that ” … parents of young Black children now feel especially compelled to initiate these conversations to equip their children with the necessary knowledge to protect themselves when interacting with police officers” (Anderson et al., 2022, p. 475). In addition to ethnicity, Wylie et al. (2024) find that three risk factors, lower socioeconomic status, more children in the household and having children with poor emotional self-regulation, make parents more eager to speak to their children about the police.

Intuitively (and naturally) such conversations likely communicate a partially negative view of law enforcement and thus predispose youths’ attitudinal development in a certain direction. April et al. (2023) found that parents of color had lower levels of trust in police, and therefore also communicated differently vis-a-vis parents with higher levels of trust in police. The former tended to communicate about aspects of compliance, thinking about personal safety, and expecting negative police behavior, whereas the latter emphasized positive messages about the police to their youths.

Within this body of scholarship, the transmission of attitudes has also been researched in the context of “direct” and “vicarious” contact with police, where parental talks and communication about police may been seen as containing elements of (information of) vicarious contact. For instance, both direct and vicarious police stops have been linked to less confidence in police (Harris and Jones, 2020), and vicarious experience is linked to more legal cynicism (Jackson et al., 2020). The inverse relationship has also been found – Turney (2022) found that mothers with adolescents who experienced police stops experienced mental health issues, and that this was “… contingent, concentrated among mothers with prior exposure to the criminal justice system …” (p. 1142), thus suggesting a cycle of direct and vicarious experiences that can mutually reinforce each other negatively.

Taking this brief overview as a point of departure in understanding how youths initially come to understand and make sense of law enforcement, it is also self-explainable that parents are critical actors when their youths have already gotten mixed up in the justice system. This potent mix contain the aforementioned theoretical cycle, in the sense that the review population (both parents and youths) have both direct and vicarious experience with the justice system through each other. In terms of the importance of family in the context of youth offender rehabilitation, the family unit has been described an indispensable (Maschi et al., 2013). The “ideal” parent to support a justice-involved youth has been described as one that is able to exert effective authority, provide emotional support and collaborate effectively with the justice system (Maschi et al., 2013). Importantly, the latter is, at least partially, predicated on the basis that parents actually believe in the justice system and its actors, including the police. Given the otherwise extant body of research on links between parent- and youths attitudes, we could expect that parental perception of police will affect rehabilitative trajectories, and thus also affect collaboration with justice system actors.

This review follows Arksey and O’Malley’s (2005) outlined procedures for a scoping review and is structured according to the Preferred Reporting Items of Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA), with the scoping review extension (Tricco et al., 2018). The less restricted nature of the scoping review aligned well with our broader interest in parents’ perceptions of the police, allowing us to explore and map the literature in terms of methods, frameworks and conceptualizations.

In collaboration with the local librarian, we developed our search strategy. To capture relevant studies, we searched the following seven databases: PsycINFO, Social Sciences Premium Collection, Scopus, E-book central, Web of Science, Criminal Justice Database and Google Scholar. The search string, as copied from the PsycINFO search, was:

(“juvenile delinquent*” OR “juvenile offender” OR “juvenile crim*” OR “juvenile justice” OR “adolescent delinquent*” OR “adolescent offender*” OR “young offender*” OR “youth crime” OR “youth re-offending”) AND (parent* OR guardian* OR mother* OR father*)

AND police*

As suggested by Arksey and O’Malley (2005) we complemented this search by conducting back- and forward searches on relevant works. Specifically, all included articles from this search were back- and forward searched for further relevant works. The full search history can be found in  Appendix 1.

We took inspiration from the SPICE model (Booth, 2006) in structuring our review. According to SPICE (setting, perspective, intervention, comparison and evaluation), the following guided our study selection. Setting-wise, the project explores parental attitudes toward law enforcement across geographical and cultural contexts. The denominator for these parents is having a youth that is involved in criminal activity, mixed up in the justice-system somehow or broadly speaking, a youth that can be classified as at-risk of engaging in antisocial and deviant behavior. This more inclusive conceptualization of the youths was done for one major reason. Our initial scans of the literature revealed that the literature is generally thin on data on parental perceptions of police with youths who are convicted and officially labelled as youth offenders. In discussing the matter, we decided to proceed with a more generous approach that could also involve youths who were not in a strict sense formally convicted. Instead, we tried to elicit samples of youths who, in some way, were in contact with the police because they exhibited behavior which is associated with future involvement with justice-related actors. However, while representing a methodological challenge and making the sample more diverse, we also found that this broader conceptualization allowed for more heterogeneous meetings with the police and enriched the analysis through further understanding how different settings- and how different contacts with police relate to different parental perceptions. Relatedly, we also allowed for fictive scenarios, such as vignette experiments, where parents were asked to act upon a set of vignettes with the fictive condition that it involved their justice-involved youth. We discuss this further in the discussion, on limitations and potential effects of including such diverse methods. Perspective-wise we take as our point of departure the parental perspective. However, we do not look at specific interventions, and we do not deploy specific comparative conditions. In terms of evaluation, we evaluate how parental attitudes generally look like, and we analyze what factors that affect parental attitudes within this context towards police. The latter allows for a broad understanding of “attitudes”, including trust, cynicism, legitimacy and more.

Prior to the study selection phase, we ensured that our inter-rater reliability was of high standard. From the search, we extracted 100 articles at random and coded independent of one another. We then calculated Cohen’s Kappa (McHugh, 2012). Cohen’s K was satisfactory (0.79). We then proceeded to scan the remaining abstracts, independent of one another. In the first round of screening, we screened abstracts, titles and keywords. According to the SPICE-model, we included all empirical articles that mentioned youth offenders and their parents in conjunction with law enforcement and outcome variables relating to attitudes. The articles had to include empirical material, meaning conceptual articles were excluded. In the final stage, we back- and forward searched all included articles, yielding an additional two articles for inclusion. Accordingly, two out of the 14 (n) final papers were included outside of the database search. The full selection procedure is visualized in below flow chart (see Figure 1).

We took inspiration from Peters et al. (2015) in our data charting process. Peters et al. (2015) original suggestion on data extraction protocol include: author(s), year of publication, source origin/country of origin, aims/purpose, study population and sample size (if applicable), methodology, intervention type and comparator (if applicable), concept, duration of the intervention (if applicable), how outcomes are measured and, finally, key findings that relate to the review question. The protocol was piloted by the second author, and slightly revised to better suit our SPICE model and review questions. We extracted the following data: author, year of publication, country, aims and purposes, study population and sample size, methodology, concept/theory, how outcomes are measured and key findings in relation to the review questions. Both authors extracted the full data and meet to discuss any disagreements.

After data extraction, both authors collectively engaged in data analysis. We took inspiration from Braun and Clarke’s (2012) thematic analysis and firstly focused our analysis on the stated research questions. As such, first, it was noted whether the articles in question related to the first, second or both research questions. The first research question pertained links between parental- and youth perception of police and was rather straightforward, since studies engaging with this question utilized similar methods and concepts (e.g. quantitatively linking parent perception of police/police legitimacy to the corresponding perception of youths). The second questions, about factors that moderated parental perceptions of police, required more analysis though. Both authors independently coded the material, where codes were created, and then refined into overarching themes that we believed best represented the data. The authors met to discuss these codes and themes and further refined them after such discussions.

The results section is structured as follows. Firstly, we provide a description of the included studies. Secondly, we attempt to answer the first research question, pertaining to the link between parents’ perception of police and youths’ perception of police. Third and finally, we answer the second research question by elaborating on the factors that affect parental perception of police officers. These factors are (1) ethnicity, race and cultural factors, (2) the context- and contact in which police meetings occur, (3) feelings of stigma and (4) communication- and interpersonal identification with the police officer. We acknowledge that these factors overlap one another.

Out of a total of 14 (n) articles, 11 were conducted in the United States and the remaining three in Canada. The majority of studies had a quantitative design (n = 8), followed by a qualitative design (n = 5) and one had a mixed-methods design. Theoretically, most studies were concerned with theories such as legal socialization, legal cynicism and procedural justice, and a subset (with the same researchers) had a more critical approach, emphasizing structural discrimination and criminalization of youths. The full sample is described in Table 1.

This review identified five studies (Cavanagh and Cauffman, 2015, 2019; Cavanagh et al., 2022; Snyder et al., 2015; Wolfe et al., 2017) that explore the link between parental and youth attitudes toward law enforcement. Across these studies, there is a clear link, showing that parents' perceptions—particularly negative views of the justice system—are closely mirrored in their children’s attitudes and behaviors toward the police.

Cavanagh and Cauffman (2015) demonstrated that mothers' negative attitudes toward the justice system have a direct influence on their sons, significantly shaping their perceptions of law enforcement and contributing to increased rates of reoffending. In a later study, Cavanagh and Cauffman (2019) extended this finding, showing that mothers' perceptions of police remain consistent with their children’s attitudes over time, suggesting that family influence plays a critical role in shaping youths’ legal socialization from adolescence onward.

Wolfe et al. (2017) further explored the role of parental perceptions of legitimacy in shaping youth attitudes toward legal authority. Their findings indicated that parents' views on police legitimacy were a strong predictor of how their children perceive the justice system, even when controlling for variables such as procedural justice perceptions, self-control and peer delinquency. This underscores the importance of legal socialization within the family unit, suggesting that interventions aimed at improving police-community relations must address the family context to be effective. Snyder et al. (2015) focused on the emotional dimensions of parental influence, specifically examining how feelings of exasperation, fear and monitoring impact the willingness of justice-involved youths to change their behavior. Their study revealed that parental emotions, particularly frustration and fear, are significant predictors of youths' readiness to engage in rehabilitative change, with notable gender differences—female adolescents showed a greater propensity for change than males. This suggests that understanding the emotional environment created by parents can lead to more targeted and effective interventions for youth offenders.

In summary, these studies consistently demonstrate the strong link between parental attitudes toward law enforcement and youth perceptions, emphasizing the role of family influence in shaping attitudes toward the justice system. Framed within the theory of legal socialization, these findings highlight the importance of addressing family perspectives in any youth justice intervention.

A range of studies focused on how factors related to race and ethnicity affected parental perceptions of police officers with somewhat varying results (Baker et al., 2024; Cavanagh and Cauffman, 2015, 2019; Cavanagh et al., 2022, 2024). These factors were conceptualized differently; Baker et al. (2024) included race as an independent variable, Cavanagh and Cauffman (2015) controlled for whether parents were born in–or outside the United States, Cavanagh and Cauffman (2019) controlled for race/ethnicity, and Cavanagh et al. (2024) focused on a sample consisting of Latina immigrant mothers, and further explored implications of legal status and experiences of family deportation.

Baker et al. (2024, p. 288) found in their vignette experiment that “… perceptions of police legitimacy mediated the relationship between race and parents’ expectations of advice …”. More specifically, parents of color had more negative perceptions of police legitimacy compared to white parents, and therefore, were more inclined to advise their children to assert their rights. Baker et al. (2024) explain this finding with reference to historical treatment of ethnic minorities in the United States, and how disparate treatment by police has ingrained low levels of trust in this target group. In short, this means that ethnic minority parents are more cautious in legal contexts, and more ready to assert rights. These are well-known scenarios in the broader literature, where the body of scholarship on “the talk” is illustrative in the sense that it provides ethnic youths with guidance on how to behave in the presence of legal authorities. Somewhat related, Cavanagh et al. (2024) examined only Latina migrant mothers’ attitudes toward police officers (and judges), further exploring how their documentation status and experiences of family deportation affected these attitudes. Undocumented mothers held more negative specific views of police officers compared to mothers with citizenship. In contrast, documentation status was unrelated to the mothers’ general view of police—instead, experiences of family deportation affected general attitudes negatively. Cavanagh et al. (2024) explain this by referring to how family deportation usually is a vicarious experience, but when the mothers’ sons are arrested, it becomes a direct experience and may thus more directly concern the documentation status as well.

However, the two remaining studies point to other directions. Firstly, Cavanagh and Cauffman (2019) found no effect on youths’ ethnicity/race on the relationship between maternal perceptions of police and youths’ perception of police. Likewise, the authors did not find that race or ethnicity affected whether mothers changed their perceptions of police following their sons’ re-arrest. Perhaps more surprisingly, when controlling for birth location, and youths’ ethnicity, Cavanagh and Cauffman (2015) found that mothers’ legitimacy attitudes were statistically significantly higher when the mothers were born outside of the United States. Likewise, using white youths as the reference group in the statistical analysis, the results showed that the mothers’ legitimacy attitudes increased when their sons were ethnic minorities.

Despite an otherwise exhaustive literature on race and discrimination in various contexts, the results here remain inconclusive as to which extent, and how, migration-related factors correlate with parental attitudes toward police. Naturally, under the assumption that police treatment is negatively conditioned by offender race, we would for instance expect that ethnic minority mothers’ attitudes would be worse following their son’s re-arrest. One reason for this inconclusiveness may be the methods and samples that have been used in these studies, but further studies need to explore the mediating link between parental migration background, attitudes and police treatment.

Under context and contact, we divide the themes according to what type of contact, under what circumstances and how severe the crime is for more detailed analysis.

Barett et al. (2022) interviewed mothers in an intervention (the Safety Net Umbrella) geared toward closer collaboration between school, police officers and parents. While one mother described the program as a (successful) “… scare tactic …” (p. 49), she also discussed how her relationships with the police officers developed in a positive orientation because she could relate to them. This mother specifically referred to demographic similarities between the two, such as age, and having children around the same age. These similarities prompted the mother’s perception of the police positively, since she believed they could relate to what she was going through in a more general sense. From the police perspective, forging this trust was essential for police officers and was also mentioned as one of the intervention’s biggest challenges. Specifically, hesitancy on the family’s behalf was frequently encountered, and it was difficult to visit the youths in their home, because, as the mother expressed, the home “… is supposed to be [a] safe space, right? And so maybe they [kids] feel like, oh, this is such an invasion of my space …” (p. 48).

Barett et al.’s (2022) findings overlap with the subsequent communication theme, in the sense that being able to relate also seemed to facilitate easier communication. In a more direct sense, however, a range of articles discussed how the police officers’ communication affected perceptions and experiences of the police contact with parents (Liegghio and Jaswal, 2015; Liegghio et al., 2020; Lind, 1996; McNeil et al., 2015). McNeil et al. (2015) found that when parents responded to their child’s first detention, the communication with the police officer was crucial in setting the tone for the forthcoming experience. Most of the parents in McNeil et al. (2015) expressed that they were treated fairly, but also that the police officer communicated the seriousness of the events in a transparent manner:

Similar narratives are expressed in Liegghio et al. (2020), where for instance a female police officer is described as “motherly” in her interaction with another youth. However, in the cases where parents experienced poor communication on behalf of the police officer, anger and frustration were clear themes. This also resonates with the studies by Lind (1996) and Liegghio and Jaswal (2015). When the police officer in charge is seen as indifferent in the officer’s way of communicating (Lind, 1996), or when the communication is fraught with mistrust and shaming (Liegghio et al., 2015), parental perceptions of police officers quickly deteriorate.

A select few studies focused on how parents felt stigmatized during police contact (Liegghio and Jaswal, 2015; Liegghio et al., 2021; Lind, 1996). Interestingly, although we might reasonably assume that stigma is a latent theme in other works on parents with justice-involved youths, the themes were more pronounced in the cases when parents felt compelled to contact the police. In the cases of Liegghio and Jaswal (2015), Liegghio et al. (2021) and Lind (1996), this occurred when the families needed help in handling potentially violent and mentally ill youths in the home, and when a youth had run away from home respectively.

According to Liegghio and Jaswal (2015) and Liegghio et al. (2021), attitudes toward police officers diverged depending on what role they took when they reached the home. When the families’ youths were violent and had to be handled, the majority of parents appreciated the police officers’ help, praising their ability to handle potentially violent situations. However, many of these youths were also mentally ill. In contrast to the previous praise, parents were largely critical of police officers’ ability to understand how this situation affected them, and how difficult it was to live a normal life and some social workers even argue that police sometimes undermine their work with these youths. Some excerpts illustrate this (p. 310):

Similarly, Lind (1996) explains how parents fear being stigmatized and process feelings of embarrassment when their youths have run away, and the parents see no other way than to call the police for help. These feelings stem from what can be deduced from Liegghio et al.’s (2015) study, namely that the parents’ parenting occasionally is de-legitimized and that they are labeled as unfit parents. Similarly, Liegghio et al. (2015) describe how the mechanisms driving stigma, particularly in the context of police interactions with families experiencing a psychiatric crisis, involve deeply entrenched societal narratives and institutional practices. Labeling a distressed individual as a “perpetrator” and their family as “victims” reinforces prejudices that associate mental illness with danger and unpredictability. This framing contributes to a cycle of stigma by criminalizing mental health crises and positioning caregivers as both helpless and culpable for their loved one’s behavior (Liegghio et al., 2015). Lind (1996) also refer to how the youths’ behavior, although not being strictly criminal in a juridical sense, risks becoming increasingly criminalized and how their youths end up wrongfully in the legal system. Notably, some parents in Lind (1996) also display greater general dissatisfaction with the (at-least then) existing policies on runaway, than they do towards specific police officers who obey under the policy frameworks.

In relation to the above, Hellgren et al. (2024) examined whether the crime severity affected parents’ advice to children to waive rights in interrogation, and whether perceptions of police legitimacy predicted advice-giving. Hellgren et al. (2024) found that these perceptions predict advice-giving across low/medium/high severity types, concluding that when parents perceive the police as just and fair, they will be less likely to assert rights independent of how severe the crime is (no interaction was tested though). Although Hellgren et al.’s study is done in a different justice context, their themes can be seen in Liegghio et al. (2015) and Lind (1996), in the sense that the parents’ perceptions of police affect various outcomes, even though the “crimes” are considered to be rather insignificant.

The purpose of this review was to examine how justice-involved youth and parental perceptions of police correspond and further understand the factors that affect parental perceptions specifically. We find that parental and youth attitudes are strongly linked, and we find a set of factors that explain how parental perceptions can vary, including demographic, interpersonal and contextual factors. In our discussion, we will take the results and position them in relation to two overarching themes to which our review contributes toward. The first theme is practical police work when meeting justice-involved youths’ parents in distress. The second theme is how the review contributes to the broader field of police science. In this review, the included studies span across psychology, criminology and social work, with some theoretical streams that could be utilized and developed within police science in a more direct manner.

In the interaction with agents of mainstream society, specifically the police, it becomes imperative that police officers are made aware of how they interact with these parents. Accordingly, a few applications for police work are necessary to mention here.

Police officers need to be aware of the parent–youth link and understand that their treatment of parents indirectly affects justice-involved youths’ perception of police. This means that police officers need to have an evidence-based approach in the meeting with parents, preferably inspired by studies from legal psychology. According to Thompson and Jenkins (2013), over 98% of police work involves verbal communication with the public; accordingly, police officers should develop skills in listening and responding empathetically to parents' concerns, showing that they are not only enforcing the law but also working in partnership with the community. While law enforcement is strained in terms of resources and time, we believe it would be fitting to organize educational workshops that have proper evidence-based foundations. Research in legal psychology has shown that humanitarian and empathetic police investigating interviewing approaches are effective in building trust and reducing feelings of intimidation and fear. These approaches also encourage greater cooperation, which directly enhances the quality of information gathered during interviews (Vanderhallen et al., 2011). Other conceptual inspiration can also be taken from police methods that emphasize dialogue-based practices. One such example is that of dialogue-based policing (see Gorringe et al., 2012), a concept that is getting increasingly prominent in the UK and Sweden. Unlike traditional approaches, which often focus on control or compliance, dialogue-based policing prioritizes communication as a tool for de-escalation and relationship-building. Such an approach recognizes that many justice-involved youths’ parents have experienced mistrust or negative interactions with authority figures and can teach concrete and actionable lessons for police officers (e.g. such as the use of empathy-driven strategies).

Beyond the practicalities, our review also contributes toward the general field of police science. Interrelated to the above, we suggest that the review highlights a range of perspectives that are less prominent when police science researchers explore perceptions of police. Traditionally, police science relies on procedural justice-theory when explaining citizen trust toward police. While procedural justice-theory is a cornerstone of police science research, there is room for theoretical complementation. The most commonly found theoretical framework we find in this review is that of legal socialization. As a perspective, legal socialization is of course not new to police science (see, e.g. Piquero et al., 2016), but it is more widely used in law- and forensic psychology, as evident in this review’s included studies. Here, we expand upon the work of social psychologist Rick Trinkner.

Procedural justice theory often centers on immediate judgments of fairness in the decision-making process (see, e.g. Donner et al., 2015) and how these experiences influence behavior and perceptions of authority. However, legal socialization helps explain where attitudes toward the law and police come from before individuals even interact with the legal system and is more easily positioned within system theory and multilevel frameworks (e.g. in this case, the family system). Trinkner has made great strides in combining these two frameworks and tested procedural justice model of legal socialization (e.g. Trinkner and Cohn, 2014), showing how legal socialization effectively mediate relationships between procedural justice and law-abiding behavior. Kaiser and Reisier (2019) has since then substantiated Trinker and Cohn’s (2014) findings through comprehensive longitudinal analyses. Trinkner and Cohn (2014, p. 602) have also argued that “… there needs to be more work in nonlegal domains, especially in those areas (e.g. parents and teachers) most important to adolescence, a critical period for legal socialization …”. We concur with this notion, adding that we need to be mindful about parents- and youths already in the justice system, since their direct- and vicarious experiences will be much more frequent compared the general population.

In short, we suggest that, when exploring delinquent youths’ reactions to police interactions (as seen through procedural justice), they are often filtered through the lens of their prior legal socialization, particularly influenced by their parents' attitudes. This creates a feedback loop: how individuals experience fairness in these encounters (procedural justice) influences their future legal socialization, either reinforcing or altering pre-existing beliefs.

One notable limitation of this review is its limited geographical focus, with many of the included studies being conducted in the United States (11 out of 14 studies; the remaining being based in Canada). This raises concerns about the generalizability of the findings to other regions with different legal systems, social norms and policing practices.

Another salient limitation that warrants attention is the conflicting results of ethnicity. In light of the extensive literature on negative perceptions of police in ethnic minority communities, we would have expected this finding here too. Further investigation into the studies yields more confusing components to this puzzle. Firstly, it is apt to mention that “ethnicity” was operationalized differently. Some studies included “race”; Black, White, Hispanic, etc. (e.g. Baker et al., 2024; Cavanagh and Cauffman, 2019), while other measures of ethnicity included whether the parent was born in–or outside the country (Cavanagh and Cauffman, 2015). Other studies dichotomized race into “… Black […] versus non-Black” (Cavanagh et al., 2022). Cavanagh et al. (2022), with the Black–non-Black operationalization had no significant effects on cynicism, Cavanagh and Cauffman (2019) had both Whites, and Latino as reference group, yielding no effects, but Cavanagh and Cauffman (2015) showed that, whether the mother was born in–or outside United States, positively affected their police perception. Notably, Cavanagh with colleagues, across all included studies, utilized data from the Crossroads study, a prospective longitudinal study of first-time juvenile offenders in Orange County, Jefferson Parish and Philadelphia, with a clear overrepresentation of ethnic minorities. The aggregate finding of the ethnic variable from this sub-part of the review is that there seem to be no findings at all.

In contrast, the vignette experiments (Baker et al., 2024) showed that ethnicity is a crucial factor. However, this sample included 84.4% White parents (see also Hellgren et al.’s (2024) vignette experiment, where 72.9% identified as White/European Americans). This means that Cavanagh et al. had longitudinal data with a (plausibly) somewhat representative sample on real-life experiences, naturally leading one to hypothesize that ethnicity would be a critical factor in shaping parental perceptions, which was not the case. In contrast, the vignette experiments constitute a 1) fictive scenario with samples that 2) do not represent justice-involved youth parents’ ethnicity, yet they yield significant effects of ethnicity which is more in line with existing literature. We conclude this section by stating that we believe the reliance on the same data (Crossroads study), in combination with generally very few studies examining ethnicity, makes us cautious in interpreting this section, and we recommend that legal socialization and cynicism is further examined with regards to the impact of ethnicity and systemic discrimination that otherwise extant literature shows before coming to any substantive conclusions.

This review demonstrates that parental perceptions of police significantly influence the attitudes of justice-involved youths and that negative parental views are strongly linked to youths’ legal cynicism. The findings emphasize the importance of police interactions with families, particularly in avoiding stigmatization and ensuring respectful, empathetic communication. Parents who feel supported and respected by police officers are more likely to view them positively and convey trust to their children. Given these results, we recommend targeted initiatives to enhance police officers’ communicative skills. Workshops and training programs focusing on respectful listening, empathetic engagement and clear, transparent communication should be prioritized. Such initiatives would strengthen relationships with families and improve long-term outcomes in police-community relations. Future research should also follow the lead by Cavanaugh and colleagues and prioritize a longitudinal exploration of attitudinal development using the legal socialization framework, and analyze more deeply the role of ethnicity in attitudinal development to understand how systemic discrimination, cultural differences and lived experiences intersect with family dynamics to shape perceptions of police.

Funding: This paper was funded by internal funds at Södertörn University.