Parental Advice on Interacting With Police Varies Widely by Race

Source for survey data (3,589 students, six school districts in St. Louis County, Missouri, 2017-2019, where researcher Ashley Jackson did her doctoral work) on racial disparity in whether a child receives “the talk” about police encounters: white/Latino students had 59% lower odds, Native American youth 45% lower odds, and Asian youth 71% lower odds of receiving it, compared with Black youth. Girls had 36% lower odds than boys; Latinas showed higher odds than Latino boys.

Corrected 2026-07-28 (approval-brief + receipt-gate): geography was previously docketed as generic “six Missouri school districts”; the article specifies St. Louis County. Also previously undocketed, verbatim: “Youth who went to school in north St. Louis County, which includes Ferguson, where 18-year-old Michael Brown was killed by police in 2014, were more likely to have had ‘The Talk’ than students who attended schools elsewhere.”

This is a university press release summarizing a peer-reviewed article in Youth & Society (Ashley Jackson, Rutgers School of Social Work); the underlying journal article itself was not independently accessed. Treat the specific percentages as reported-by-university, not independently confirmed against the primary dataset or paper.