Prior police contacts and police discretion with apprehended youth : Contacts antérieurs avec la police et pouvoir discrétionnaire de la police à l'égard des jeunes arrêtés

The novelty of the present research lies in its creation and use of a variable operationalizing the number of times in the past that the young person had been apprehended by the police. [...] In general, errors in measurement of variables (such as overestimates of prior contacts) result in attenuation of correlations, so the result of such error would be a small underestimate of the impact of prior contacts on police dispositions, and a small overestimate of the impact of other related variables, such as the youth’s age. [...] The number of prior police contacts is related to the presence of a firearm, major injury to a victim, the type of relationship, if any, between the youth and a victim in the incident, solo versus group offending, and the apprehended youth’s sex and aboriginal status (Table 6). [...] The percentage charged for incidents involving a firearm is substantially reduced when other related factors are controlled, partly because of the relationship with the number of prior police contacts (Table 6), and partly because the presence of a firearm usually results in the classification of the offence as a serious indictable offence; therefore much of the impact of this variable is already [...] Some of this differential might be due to factors not included in the statistical analysis, such as the availability of diversion programs, the demeanour of the youth, or the role of the parents, but it seems unlikely that these could account entirely for the clear relationship shown in the second column of Table 12.