Drug policing of youth : examining pre- and post-stop conditions and outcomes

Abstract: Given the strong focus on minor drug offenses in Swedish drug control policy and the risk of disparate drug enforcement that may follow from such policies, this thesis explores drug enforcement and the use of coercive measures (enforced drug tests and body searches) towards youths aged 15-20 years. The first study focuses on the circumstances of the detection of minor drug offenses, the grounds for suspicion and use of coercive measures. The second study explores ethnic disparities in exposure to drug tests, as well as ethnic disparities in relation to hitrates for drug tests and body searches. The results show that about one-third of the minor drug situations were detected in a reactive policing manner, and approximately 30-40 percent were detected in association with other offenses. The findings suggest that the grounds for enforcing drug tests and body searches often were based on subjective cues. Results from the second study show that youths subjected to a drug test were male, born outside Europe, and had unemployed fathers to a significantly greater extent than the drug-using youths in the school survey. Additionally, youths born outside Europe were more likely than youths born in Sweden to be submitted to coercive measures that produced a negative result. This finding was dependent on the definition of ethnic background that was employed. The findings suggest that future research should investigate a number of pre- and post-stop conditions and outcomes. Research on pre-stop conditions should further explore: 1) the distribution of "criminal" signs between different sociodemographic groups and their probability for a hit, 2) the importance of concurrent offending for the detection of drug offenses, and 3) the nature of drug use, transactions, and dealing in association with the risk for suspicion. Research on post-stop conditions and outcomes should explore: 1) ethnic disparities in hitrates of body searches and drug tests with more detailed data on ethnic background (specific region-based vulnerabilities), and 2) neighborhood effects on searches and drug tests, including hit-rates, both on an individual level and a neighborhood level. Research on various forms of police bias in drug enforcement should integrate both neighborhood- and individual-level processes in relation to pre-stop and post-stop conditions and outcomes to understand the mechanisms behind ethnic disparities. Finally, future research should focus on the "gender gap" found in this study and previous studies on drug enforcement.