Navigating Mental Health: Associations between Police Interactions and Depression In Young Adulthood

Background and Purpose: Police contact is being recognized as a strong factor and determinant of mental health, yet its relationship with depression across the developmental stages of youth remains underexplored. Young adults from economically disadvantaged backgrounds face disproportionate exposure to police stops and contact, which may carry significant psychological consequences in their later adolescent years. This study examines the association between the timing of personal police stops during adolescence and young adulthood and depressive symptoms at age 22, and whether this association is moderated by their gender identity.

Methods: Data were drawn from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS), a nationally representative longitudinal cohort of children born primarily to unmarried mothers across 20 U.S. cities. The analytic sample comprised 1,856 young adults who completed interviews at both the Year 15 and Year 22 waves. Police contact was operationalized as a three-level categorical variable: no stop, early stop only (before age 15), and later or repeated stops (at or after age 15, or at both time points). Depressive symptoms were measured using the CIDI-SF scale in Year 22, yielding a continuous score (0–8) and a constructed binary liberal depression indicator. Ordinary least squares (OLS) and linear probability models (LPM) were estimated, adjusting for adolescent demographic characteristics, behavioral and educational variables, and parental factors. Supplementary analyses were run to ensure robustness and sensitivity checks, examining race/ethnicity as a moderator and testing alternative operationalizations of police contact.

Results: Approximately 52% of the sample reported police contact by age 22, and 39% met the liberal criteria for depression. In the fully adjusted OLS model, young adults who experienced a later or repeated police stop reported depressive symptom scores approximately 0.45 units higher than those who were never stopped, representing a roughly 20% increase relative to the sample mean of 2.35. LPM results similarly indicated that later or repeated stops were associated with a 6-percentage-point higher probability of meeting the depression threshold. No significant moderation by gender identity or race/ethnicity was detected. Among covariates, bisexual/pansexual and non-binary identities, female gender, Black/African American race, and maternal depression were significantly associated with depressive symptoms.

Conclusions and Implications: The timing of police contact is central to understanding its mental health consequences. Recent and repeated police stops are consistently linked to elevated depressive symptoms, while early stops alone showed no significant independent association after adjustment. The absence of gender or racial moderation suggests that the psychological burden of police contact may be broadly experienced, though limited subgroup sizes may have reduced statistical power to detect such differences. These findings underscore the mental health risks associated with ongoing or recent police contact among young adults during critical developmental periods.