Drug Prevention Programs

Adolescents have been observed to have negative attitudes toward police officers, yet police officers are increasingly being used as resource persons and instructors in school-based prevention programs in the US. This has the likelihood of adversely affecting the effective-ness of these programs but adolescents attitudes toward program and/or police instructors have not been adequately examined. This study uses multi-level structural equation modeling to explore attitudes toward police officers and instructors as well as the factors influencing the attitudes among middle and high school students in a nationwide longitudinal evaluation of a school-based substance abuse prevention program delivered by Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) officers. The findings suggest the students were generally impartial in their attitudes toward police officers but were fairly posi-tive in their attitudes toward police instructors. These attitudes de-clined over time and varied according to students individual charac-teristics and contextual factors.