Effects of police violence on citizen calls for service: The killing of Samuel DuBose in Cincinnati, Ohio

Abstract

ABSTRACT Research on the impact of police violence on citizens’ willingness to call the police has yielded mixed results, with some studies finding strong effects and others finding none. We contribute to this literature by examining whether calls for service declined in the aftermath of the killing of Samuel DuBose by a University of Cincinnati Police Department officer in 2015. We employ an interrupted time series design, treating the DuBose killing as an exogenous shock that may have altered the trend in calls for service from 2014 to 2016. We gathered data on 911 calls and crime incidents from the Cincinnati Police Department, to which we appended block group-level demographic data from the American Community Survey. We find a substantial unconditional effect of DuBose’s killing on the level of calls for service in all neighborhoods, especially in majority Black neighborhoods. The size of these effects is reduced substantially after introducing controls; nevertheless, the effect of the DuBose killing is still significant in calls for service in all block groups and for majority Black block groups. We conclude by calling for increased research on the community-level impacts of police violence.