What’s the Issue?

Young people today face many challenges. Young people of color, queer, and gender-non-conforming youth experience more than their fair share of a particular kind of challenge: growing up policed.

African American and Latino youth (ages 15-24) are more often targeted by police for stops, even when they haven’t broken any laws. In 2011, NYPD stopped people 685,724 times, as this map indicates.  In 90% of those stops, there was no ticket or charge issued. Increasingly, this sort of policing begins in schools.  Where even minor disciplinary problems get escalated to the criminal justice system. For example, 16-year-old Keira Wilmot of Polk County, Florida was recently arrested for a science experiment gone awry.

LGBT youth are often more policed than people realize. LGBT, queer and gender-non-conforming youth are also disproportionately targeted by police for non-criminal offenses. And, even minor attempts to resist gender norms can be seen as “discipline problems” within schools. LGBTQ youth are more likely to have been exposed to violence in their home. They are more likely to run away and be referred to the authorities by family members. Not surprisingly, this contributes to their being stopped by the police more often than heterosexual kids.

An estimated 25% to 40% of New York City’s 20,000 runaway and homeless youth are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (State of the City’s Homeless Youth Report, 2005). In fact, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force refers to the high levels of homelessness among LGBTQ youth as an “epidemic” (Ray, 2006).

Many of these LGBTQ youth are also African American or Latina/o, but precise figures are hard to come by.  In a 2008 report, the Empire State Coalition of Youth and Family Services found that among the ranks of homeless youth in New York City, almost half of respondents identified as African American, a third as Latina. More than a quarter reported time spent in foster care, jail or prison. Half of those interviewed did not have a high school diploma or GED (Empire State Coalition of Youth and Family Services, 2007).

In the face of these enormous challenges, young people are resilient and creative. And, young people are using mobile technologies to survive and to challenge aggressive policing tactics that damage individual lives and harm their communities.

We want to help these young people do this better, more effectively, by training them in the tools of data-driven journalism.