While previous research has explored the policing of adults and older teenagers in Britain, little is known about how law enforcement officers police children. The current study draws on self-report questionnaire data to explore the relationship between the police and children. The main hypothesis is that police disproportionately target certain groups of children based on their socioeconomic background. Data were gathered from 4,300 youth attending secondary school in the City of Edinburgh in 1998 for a study of youth transitions and crime; respondents were around age 12 years. Measures included in the questionnaire were seven types of adversarial police contact, demographic information on the respondents, patterns of adversarial police contact, characteristics of adversarial police contact, and risk behaviors of respondents. Results of descriptive and multivariate analyses indicated that adversarial child-police contact was significantly related to the low socioeconomic background of the child, their involvement in offending and other risky behaviors, their propensity to be visible in public without parental supervision, and their previous experience of police contact. The findings support the argument that police engage in a form of urban discipline in which the affluent are viewed as respectable while those of lower economic status are viewed as unrespectable, resulting in the unfair targeting of poor youth. This type of child-police interaction has the potential to negatively impact the subsequent behavior of young people. Tables, appendixes, notes, references