Police officers’ implicit theories of youth offending

Abstract

How police understand youth offending at least partly informs their responses to it. It is therefore vital to document police implicit theories about youth offending. However, little previous research has examined this topic. This article addresses this gap by examining police implicit theories about youth crime and how it ought to be addressed. Using social control theory as an analytic framework, it critically examines 41 semi-structured qualitative interviews with police undertaken for a larger study in Queensland, Australia. A number of implications stem from the analysis, not the least of which is the disjuncture between police implicit theories of youth offending, and the localised, historicised and contextual realities of young people’s – especially marginalised young people’s – offending behaviour.