Police Violence Exposure Among Young Adults in a U.S. National Probability Sample

= 1,077) drawn from the nationally representative AmeriSpeak Panel. Logistic regression was used to test for associations between self-reported and census-based sociodemographic characteristics and past-year exposure to police violence (outcome), assessed using the previously validated Police Practices Inventory. Past-year police violence was widely reported among this general population sample (physical: 4.0%; sexual: 3.3%; psychological: 8.5%; neglect: 7.5%), equating to an estimated 2.1 million young adults exposed to physical violence and 1.7 million exposed to sexual violence. All police violence measures were associated with race/ethnicity in unadjusted analyses, with some outcomes also associated with gender identity, socioeconomic status, urbanicity, and region of residence. Black (non-Latine) race was the only consistent correlate of all four sub-types of police violence exposure in the adjusted analyses. Expanding upon prior studies that used nonprobability samples in select U.S. cities, we found that police violence is experienced by a substantial minority of the U.S. young adult population, and that ethnoracial disparities generalize beyond urban centers to a nationally representative sample.