Police Decisions under the Youth Criminal Justice Act. The Effect of Gender and Ethnic Appearance
The matter of racial profiling is often raised when discussing police intervention. Many analyses have, indeed, shown that certain groups within society, such as Blacks and men, are overrepresented in the population of arrested or intercepted individuals. Moreover, Darrell Steffensmeier and his collegues, who have focused some of their work on this concern, demonstrate a much more complex situation than initially anticipated : they suggest that certain individual characteristics interact with one another, leading to multiplied, rather than simply added, effects on the severity of judicial decision-makers. In this regard, the present study seeks to test the interaction between gender and ethnic appearance, two visible components of an individual’s identity, on police decision-making. Concretely, the study focuses on the decision to resort to extrajudicial measures for adolescents intercepted for shoplifting incidents totaling 200$ or less in a large Canadian city, as allowed by the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) (n = 1647 decisions). Results show that, for equivalent offences, non-white adolescent boys are between 1.7 and 2.0 times less likely than other youth to benefit from extrajudicial measures. The other three groups of adolescent offenders (white boys, white girls, non-white girls) are not statistically different from one another. In conclusion, the analysis suggests that such treatment of juvenile offenders by police does not seem to derive from police malice but rather from judicial policies favouring the arrest of a greater proportion of non-white boys.