In this interview, Jaquelyn Jahn discusses two of her recently published papers, which examine the effects of policing, and police violence, on vulnerable groups: teenagers and pregnant women.

Jaquelyn Jahn is starting her second year as a postdoctoral scholar at the Stone Center. She is a social epidemiologist whose research focuses on the consequences of social policies for population health and health equity. 

Your paper in The Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health is the first to look at the emotional impact of police stops on adolescent boys and girls. How did you carry out the study?

Jahn: This paper looks at a sample of adolescent girls and boys that’s representative of Black and white children in the U.S. population. First, it asks how many of these girls and boys were stopped by police two or more times in the last six months. That is, for Black girls, Black boys, white boys, white girls, what is the distribution of police stops? The reason that’s useful is because, even though there are federal data that give an estimate of how often police come in contact with the public, those data don’t include adolescents under age 16. Just knowing the prevalence of this experience is a helpful step.

Then, for each of those four groups, the paper looks at the extent to which police stops predict two different mental health outcomes: depressive symptoms and lower assessments of subjective wellbeing. The youth in this study are reporting on their experiences [with police stops] in the last six months and about their subjective wellbeing at the time of the interview, and are being assessed for depressive symptomatology using a clinical screening tool for youth.

From what I understood, the results were mixed in terms of gender and race.

Jahn: We really wanted to look across both race and gender for Black and white boys and girls. Descriptively, our results confirm that unequal patterns in police stops across gender and race among adults are also present for adolescents. Over 20 percent of Black boys were stopped by police two or more times in the last six months, whereas this number was around 9 percent for white boys and even lower among girls (the frequency of police stops did not differ between Black and white girls, although previous research suggests that encounters may be more intrusive among Black as compared with white girls). We are also interested in how, based on some previous research, the nature of those interactions might be different for girls and boys and how these differences could contribute to adolescent mental health. Another factor to consider is that girls, on average, have different emotional developmental trajectories compared to boys, and are therefore more likely to report depressive symptoms, particularly earlier in adolescence than boys. So, we hypothesized that girls might be particularly vulnerable to these kinds of experiences affecting their emotional health.

I think the big takeaway is the very strong relationship between police stops and both of the mental health outcomes we assess among girls, especially girls whose parents have been incarcerated. We found that both Black and white girls who were stopped in the last six months had a particularly strong relationship between depressive symptoms and police stops. Because of the way that the data were collected, we don’t know if higher levels of depressive symptoms are causing higher levels of police stops, or if higher levels of police stops are causing higher levels of depressive symptoms. Either scenario is concerning because both have potentially life-long consequences.

For the second outcome, Black and white girls who reported more police stops also had worse assessments of subjective wellbeing, and this relationship was slightly stronger for Black girls compared to white girls.

You mentioned that adolescent girls, in general, have different emotional trajectories than boys. Do you see girls as more likely to be affected emotionally by these stops, or possibly more likely to understand what’s happening to them and to be able to express it?

Jahn: This gets exactly at the core challenges of this work. There are several things to highlight. It could be that the average level of depressive symptoms in girls, regardless of their experience with police stops, is higher compared to boys. That could be because girls are developmentally experiencing these things earlier than boys, or it could be because the way that we measure depressive symptoms and the tool that we use is more sensitive to girls compared to boys.

In fact, we did find some evidence that the measurement tool is not performing as well across Black and white girls and boys. That’s something we weren’t able to change, because this is an existing data resource. So we can’t say if the strength of this association in girls compared to boys is because of their developmental maturity or because of their sensitivity to the measure.

What about the factor of parental incarceration, which the paper also considers?

Jahn: We looked at parental incarceration because we thought that if an adolescent has had that prior exposure to the criminal legal system, that might be a factor that shapes their experiences of police and their understanding of police stops.

We found that, among girls, the association between police stops and depressive symptoms was stronger if they’d had a parent incarcerated. Although, with the parental incarceration piece of it, we did not have sufficient sample size to look at racial differences across girls’ parental incarceration status. However, more Black girls in the sample had a history of parental incarceration compared to white girls.

But for boys, you didn’t find this strong relationship?

Jahn: Yes. Here’s where we get into some of the complex and unexpected findings. For the first outcome, depressive symptoms, there was an association between police stops and depressive symptoms for white but not Black boys.

We know that Black boys are criminalized more often than white boys. They have higher levels of police contact. We hypothesized that with that higher level of police contact, they might be experiencing more depressive symptoms as a result of that police contact.

There could be a few explanations for the null association among Black boys. One explanation could be that Black boys are stopped at such high levels that there really is no relationship between these stops and depressive symptoms. It could be that police stops are more normalized or expected and they’re possibly receiving peer or parental support to mitigate the harmful effects of these experiences.

Another explanation could be that the tools we had to measure depressive symptoms in adolescent Black boys didn’t work as well in this group compared to other groups. That is likely to be true from our tests of the depressive symptoms measure, but this study wasn’t able to fully tease apart those two explanations.

As a next step, would you like to see the development of better tools?

Jahn: That is definitely one thing that should be done. I will also say that there have been other studies that looked at different kinds of mental health outcomes, like post-traumatic stress symptoms [PTSD], and did find an association between police stops and PTSD symptoms among Black boys. Maybe the relevant mental health outcome for that population isn’t depressive symptoms but some other kind of emotional health issue.

The other core piece of research that would help advance this work is if we had a more precise understanding of mental health before police stops and then also after police stops for these adolescents. Then we could start to tease apart which preceded which.

What led you to do this particular study, knowing the tools were limited in some ways?

Jahn: I actually didn’t know the tools were limited before I started. It was a big learning process, that’s for sure.

I was motivated to do this work by the large-scale social movements led by youth and especially Black, Latinx, and Indigenous youth of color, who have been mobilizing around the experiences with police and criminalization that they’d had at a really young age, and thinking about how these experiences might affect their health and development. I looked at what available data existed to see if I could try to look at this at a population level, which is why I ended up using this dataset, which is a great nationally representative resource but also has some core challenges.

Your second paper, published in The Lancet’s EClinicalMedicine, gives estimates of the association between fatal police violence and pregnancy loss. Just to clarify: the women in the community haven’t necessarily witnessed — and possibly don’t even know about — specific incidents of police violence in their community?

Jahn: Yes, the second study does look at a different kind of experience than the first. The study on adolescents is about their own direct experiences with police, whereas the second study is about the communities women live in and how policing within those communities might affect their pregnancies. We don’t know if the women in the study knew about the incidents of police violence in their community or not, but this study finds that on a population level, after incidents of police violence there is more pregnancy loss in those communities.

There is other work that has looked at pregnant women with children in the household: when they know about an incident of police violence in their community, it worsens depressive symptoms and they report higher levels of anxiety about the safety of their children. That might be one of the core reasons why we’re seeing this pattern of pregnancy loss after incidents of police violence, but we weren’t able to test that in this particular study.

What are the findings of the study?

Jahn: There are two main findings. The first is that overall, among all women, for each incident of fatal police violence that happened in a city and its surrounding area, there was a 0.14 percent decrease in the total number of live births in those places.

A decrease in live births in this study suggests that there’s a rise in pregnancy loss. Although changes in the number of live births can be due either to changes in the number of conceptions or to changes in the number of lost pregnancies, we looked specifically at changes in the number of live births after incidents of fatal police that occurred after conception.

The 0.14 percent decrease in live births is pretty small if we think about the scale of an effect, but it’s particularly meaningful, because, one, it’s a very preventable decline, and, two, it’s a decline that doesn’t happen equally across communities.

The second big finding from this paper is that, among Black women, there was a 0.3 percent decline in births — basically, a stronger effect, about twice as strong of an effect compared to the overall effect. We also observed a decline among Asian women and Latina women. We didn’t see that same decline among white women.

Do you have to control for other factors, such as whether unemployment suddenly surged in these communities or other potential stressors?

Jahn: One of the strengths of this paper is that it uses a specific methodology called a distributive lag model to look at changes within places over time as they occur during pregnancy. So we’re able to rule out, one, characteristics of areas that make them have higher levels of pregnancy loss compared to other areas. Therefore features like residential segregation, which we know predicts pregnancy loss, can’t explain this association that we found. And, the second reason this methodology is useful is because for changes in other factors to explain the association, these other factors would have to happen at the same time as incidents of fatal police violence.

One thing we talk about in the paper is that incidents of police violence in a community might cause a woman and others within their social networks to recall previous negative experiences with police that they’ve had or their loved ones have had. Those kinds of stressors can provoke heightened vigilance, disturbed sleep, and depressive symptoms during pregnancy. All of those types of stressors, when they occur during pregnancy, can result in pregnancy loss.

What first brought you into this specific area of research — looking at the impact of the criminal justice system on public health?

Jahn: Several things coming together at the same time. When I was a doctoral student, I started working with my doctoral advisor, Nancy Krieger, who developed ecosocial theory and whose research is about how structural racism causes racial inequities and health outcomes. While I was learning from her, I started working with an activist coalition against toxic water and medical neglect in Massachusetts prisons that is led by currently incarcerated people.

The real education that I’ve received from the coalition is understanding how the criminal legal system is a manifestation of structural racism, and also how my academic work about structural racism was being lived out and experienced by people very close to where I was living. Working with the coalition showed me how to turn to the community for solutions to the health problems I was documenting in my academic work.

Read the Studies:

 
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