Calls For Police Service Research Articles

Measuring Cybercrime in Calls for Police Service

Measuring Cybercrime in Calls for Police Service

Operationalizing deployment time in police calls for service

Operationalizing deployment time in police calls for service

Operationalizing deployment time in police calls for service

Analyses of emergency calls for service data in the United States suggest that around 50% of dispatched police deployment time is spent on crime-related incidents. The remainder of time is spent in a social service capacity: attending well-being checks and resolving disturbances, for instance. These findings have made a considerable contribution to the discourse around public perceptions of the police and the distribution of public funds towards (or away) from law enforcement. Yet, an outstanding issue remains. No investigation has been undertaken into whether findings are robust to the different ways in which ‘time spent’ is operationalized in these studies. Using dispatch data for Amsterdam during 2019, this study compares three operationalizations of ‘time spent’. Additionally, in order to provide some context on the potential mechanisms through which these different operationalizations might yield different results, we report on dispatch numbers per incident category and provide an initial exploration into ‘multi-dispatch’ incident types. We find that general proportional breakdowns are fairly robust to the time measure used. However, for some incident categories (e.g. Health) and incident types (e.g. Shootings), analyzed in isolation, the results are not robust to the different operationalizations. We propose that the mechanism explaining this lack of robustness can be traced to the high dispatch numbers for specific incident categories and types, particularly those with an imminent threat to life.Preregistration: This study has been preregistered under the title: Scale and composition of emergency reactive police demand in Amsterdam, Netherlands (https://osf.io/qgwv6/).

The association between professional sporting events and police calls for service in San Antonio, Texas

ABSTRACT The influence of sporting events on crime is an important but under-researched area in criminology. Although this literature is growing, it mostly focuses on whether crime changes in the city/area where a sporting event is taking place. Thus, it is unclear whether crime in a different city/state can be affected by airing a sporting event on television. The current study contributes to the literature by investigating the impact of televised professional sporting events by the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL on calls for police service in San Antonio, Texas. Specifically, this study examines whether five categories of police calls for service in San Antonio increase or decrease on days in which NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL games take place compared to days with no games. This study examines this association between March 2020 and March 2021 during which in-person sporting events were not permitted in San Antonio because of COVID-19 restrictions. Results indicate that days with particular sporting events are associated with increases in certain calls for police service, while others are associated with decreases. Our findings suggest that police departments may consider increased patrol on days that certain sporting events take place.

Correction to: The ‘Criminalization’ of the Cop: How Incremental, Systematic Flaws Lead to Misunderstanding Police Calls for Service Involving Persons with Mental Illness

Correction to: The ‘Criminalization’ of the Cop: How Incremental, Systematic Flaws Lead to Misunderstanding Police Calls for Service Involving Persons with Mental Illness

Policing a pandemic: investigating San Antonio’s response to COVID-19’s new crime of public health violations

ABSTRACT After the novel coronavirus began spreading across the U.S., many state and local governments imposed COVID-19 restrictions in an attempt to slow the spread. These COVID-19 mitigation techniques had a large impact on policing, as they created a new crime category for police to enforce, COVID-19 public health violations. The current study aims to address some of the uninvestigated questions about policing a pandemic using a unique dataset that combines three sources of official data from San Antonio, Texas. Specifically, we examine the associations between enforcement of COVID-19 public health violations, police calls for service, and COVID-19 case numbers. We also test for interactions between COVID-19 case numbers and police calls for service with respect to a change in the enforcement of COVID-19 public health violations. Results indicate that both police calls for service and COVID-19 case numbers are significantly associated with enforcement activities for COVID-19 public health violations. Additionally, enforcement is conditioned by the amount and type of police calls for service. Policymakers should consider the work and responsibilities the agencies they expect to enforce these COVID-19 policies already have. Haphazardly assigning an agency, such as the police, this new role without carefully considering whether they can feasibly take on more could lead to less enforcement of the COVID-19 restrictions.

A Case Study of Family Violence During COVID-19 in San Antonio

The current study investigates the effects of coronavirus restrictions on family violence in the seventh largest city in the country, San Antonio, Texas. Two streams of data were used to evaluate the potential change between what occurred during the lockdown period versus what would have been expected, including the COVID-19 Government Response Stringency Index and police calls for service from the San Antonio Police Department. The methodological approach used takes advantage of feature engineering, various machine learning time series forecasting techniques commonly leveraged in financial technical analysis, as well as cross-validation for optimized model selection. These techniques have not been considered in previous domestic or family violence-related research. During the lockdown period in San Antonio, we observed a larger than expected increase in calls to police for family violence incidents. Specifically, an increase of over fourteen percent of police calls for family incidents was observed. The findings of the current study suggest that social service and social welfare agencies consider and plan for how future pandemics or other major disasters will affect the incidence of family violence and take appropriate steps now to bolster resources and scale up for the future.

Re-assessing measurement error in police calls for service: Classifications of events by dispatchers and officers.

Police calls for service are an important conduit by which officers and researchers can obtain insight into public requests for police service. Questions remain, however, about the quality of these data, and, particularly, the prevalence of measurement error in the classifications of events. As part of the present research, we assess the accuracy of call-types used by police dispatchers to describe events that are responded to by police officers. Drawing upon a sample of 515,155 calls for police service, we explore the differences among initial call-types, cleared call-types, and crime-types as documented in crime reports. Our analyses reveal that although the majority of calls for service exhibit overlap in their classifications, many still exhibit evidence of misclassification. Our analyses also reveal that such patterns vary as a function of call- and crime-type categories. We discuss our findings in light of the challenges of the classification process and the associated implications.

The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health calls for police service

Drawing upon seven years of police calls for service data (2014–2020), this study examined the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on calls involving persons with perceived mental illness (PwPMI) using a Bayesian Structural Time Series. The findings revealed that PwPMI calls did not increase immediately after the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020. Instead, a sustained increase in PwPMI calls was identified in August 2020 that later became statistically significant in October 2020. Ultimately, the analysis revealed a 22% increase in PwPMI calls during the COVID-19 pandemic than would have been expected had the pandemic not taken place. The delayed effect of the pandemic on such calls points to a need for policymakers to prioritize widely accessible mental health care that can be deployed early during public health emergencies thus potentially mitigating or eliminating the need for increased police intervention, as was the case here.

Comment on “COVID‐19's Lockdown and Crime Victimization: The State of Emergency under the Abe Administration”

Shen et al. (2021) investigate the effect of COVID-19 on criminal behavior in Japan using a difference-in-differences approach. Their study covers a 3-year time period from 2018 to 2020, using a database of publicly available crime statistics (Hanzai Toukei) from all 47 prefectures. While there is a growing, global evidence base exploring how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected criminal behavior, Shen et al. is the first to investigate this important social issue in Japan to date. Their key contribution is the finding that Japan's voluntary lockdown in April and May 2020 reduced both violent and property crime victimization rates significantly. Additional findings show a significant decline in sexual assault victimization for those below the age of 30, and that the 30–59 age group saw the greatest fall in crime victimization due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this context, I would like to offer some specific comments on Shen et al.'s approach to regional differences in the data, its conclusions on mental health, and, finally, its policy recommendations regarding COVID-19 resource allocation. First, it is not clear why Shen et al. did not consider the regional variations in the data. It is evident from the Hanzai Toukei figures that the decrease in the number of arrests for “property crime” varied by region between 2018 and 2020. Shen et al. closely follows Leslie and Wilson (2020), whose analysis of data on police calls for service from 14 large metropolitan US cities showed that COVID-19 increased domestic violence. Given that city characteristics are unlikely to vary, regional differences in the Japanese data are something that should be emphasized. It would therefore be helpful to explain and justify why these differences were not explored further. Second, I would like to comment on one of Shen et al.'s conclusions pertaining to mental health. Shen et al. state that, “Japan has shown that the lockdown had a positive effect on mental health when proxied by suicide rates.” The statistics do indeed show a decline in the number of suicides during the lockdown. However, the number started to increase after the lockdown. Shen et al. refer to Ueda et al. (2020), and Tanaka and Okamoto (2021). In fact, both papers conclude that the number of deaths by suicide declined during the initial phase of the pandemic (February to June 2020), but from July 2020 actually began to accelerate, exceeding suicide numbers in the previous year. The source of the increase was suicides among females, children, and adolescents. Furthermore, and somewhat disturbingly, the number of suicides recorded in October 2020 was higher than the total number of deaths due to COVID-19 from the entire months of February 2020 until October 2020. It would therefore be prudent to state the limitations of using suicide rates as a proxy for mental health. Although Shen et al. only analyzed data from January to May in 2020, they should be clear that, while their analysis suggests an initially positive effect on mental health during the lockdown (when proxied by suicide rates, which showed a significant fall during the voluntary lockdown period, primarily in suicides stemming from economic and living conditions), previous studies have shown that suicides increased in the period following the COVID-19 lockdown, and, thus, its medium-to-long-term effects on mental health present a much more complicated picture. Finally, I wish to address one of the policy implications that Shen et al. put forward in their discussion. Having found that the lockdown reduced both violent and property crime rates, Shen et al. suggest that limited public resources could be reallocated from some sectors – such as police and criminal justice – to health care, in order to alleviate the added stresses on the health sector during the pandemic. However, is it right to say that, overall, the Japanese health sector was under such levels of stress? Ii and Watanabe (2021) analyze the impact of the first, second, and third waves of the COVID-19 pandemic on the health care system in Japan, and find a drastic decline in outpatient visits and inpatient admissions. Only about 3% of the total general beds in Japan were used for COVID-19 patients. Those hospitals which accepted COVID-19 patients have been under additional stresses, but many other clinics and hospitals have, in fact, suffered from a loss in demand. While there may need to be resource reallocation within the health sector, a diversion of resources from other sectors may not be necessary.

Measuring the Impacts of Everyday Police Proactive Activities: Tackling the Endogeneity Problem

To examine how the practice of daily proactivity affects and responds to changes in crime at micro geographic and temporal scales. Police calls for service and automated vehicle location data from a large suburban jurisdiction were used to create comprehensive measures of police proactivity. Panel data and the generalized method of moments framework were applied to tease out the endogenous relationships between crime and police proactivity and understand the unique impact of proactive patrol and crime upon one another. Daily police proactivity in this locality was highly stable at micro places, although police did intensify their activities very briefly in response to recent changes in crime. In turn, increases in proactive patrol generated immediate increases in crime reporting, followed by fleeting residual deterrent effects that were weaker and less robust. The patterns remained relatively consistent when varying the units of analysis or focusing on hot spots with different profiles of proactivity, but the deterrent effects appeared more sensitive to model specification. Of all measures of proactivity, patrols of medium length and non-traffic enforcement activities were associated with stronger evidence of crime reduction effects. Short-term adjustments in hot spot patrols appear to produce both reporting effects and temporary residual deterrent effects as measured through calls for service and police vehicle location data. Police could potentially enhance and prolong their deterrence by adopting more deliberate strategies with their daily proactive behaviors, including making their proactive activities more targeted and sustained.

The immediate and long-term effects of COVID-19 stay-at-home orders on domestic violence calls for service across six U.S. jurisdictions

ABSTRACT We assessed immediate and long-term trends in calls for police service regarding domestic violence following COVID-19 stay-at-home orders. Using open data from the Police Data Initiative, we performed interrupted time-series analyses of weekly calls for service for domestic violence in New Orleans (LA), Cincinnati (OH), Seattle (WA), Salt Lake City (UT), Montgomery County (MD), and Phoenix (AZ). Results indicate that five of the six jurisdictions experienced an immediate, significant spike in domestic violence calls for service (Cincinnati being the lone exception). As stay-at-home orders were lifted throughout the remainder of 2020, domestic violence calls for service declined in every jurisdiction but Salt Lake City. These results illustrate (1) the importance of studying the localized effects of COVID-19 on criminal justice issues, (2) the need for more agencies to publish open data in a timely fashion, and (3) the caution researchers and the public must use when working with calls for service data, which are not uniform across agencies and require careful cleaning prior to analysis.

Changes in Police Calls for Service During the Early Months of the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic poses multiple challenges for policing, including the need to continue responding to calls from the public. Several contingency plans warned police to expect a large and potentially overwhelming increase in demand from the public during a pandemic, but (to the author’s knowledge) there is no empirical work on police demand during a major public health emergency. This study used calls-for-service data from 10 large cities in the USA to analyse how calls for service changed during the early months of the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, compared to forecasts of call volume based on data from previous years. Contrary to previous warnings, overall the number of calls went down during the early weeks of the pandemic. There were substantial reductions in specific call types, such as traffic collisions, and significant increases in others, such as calls to dead bodies. Other types of calls, particularly those relating to crime and order maintenance, continued largely as before. Changes in the frequency of different call types present challenges to law enforcement agencies, particularly since many will themselves be suffering from reduced staffing due to the pandemic. Understanding changes to calls in detail will allow police leaders to put in place evidence-based plans to ensure they can continue to serve the public.

The Police as Place-Consolidators: The Organizational Amplification of Urban Inequality

Efforts to understand racial inequality in policing often focus on the micro-level, examining the situational dynamics of police-citizen encounters. This Article explores racial inequality in policing from another angle: it asks how the police organization responds to and further constructs the surrounding urban environment. I examine a police department’s move toward local and decentralized approaches, captured in a redistricting reform and subsequent district-level strategies and initiatives. I draw on several sources of data, including public documents, in-depth interviews with decision makers and stakeholders, a year of ethnographic observation of police work in two districts, and data on calls for police service. I find that the police drew upon symbolic ideas that emphasized the violence of black neighborhoods and the economic value of white neighborhoods in developing local strategies. As they acted in relation to these distinctions, the police amplified disparities in service provision and social control, consolidating the character of an already segregated and unequal landscape

Noise Disturbances and Calls for Police Service in València (Spain): A Logistic Model with Spatial and Temporal Effects

The purpose of this paper is to explore the presence of spatial and temporal effects on the calls for noise disturbance service reported to the Local Police of València (Spain) in the time period from 2014 to 2015, and investigate how some socio-demographic and environmental variables affect the noise phenomenon. The analysis is performed at the level of València’s boroughs. It has been carried out using a logistic model after dichotomization of the noise incidence variable. The spatial effects consider first- and second-order neighbors. The temporal effects are included in the model by means of one- and two-week temporal lags. Our model confirms the presence of strong spatio-temporal effects. We also find significant associations between noise incidence and specific age groups, socio-economic status, land uses, and recreational activities, among other variables. The results suggest that there is a problem of "social" noise in València that is not exclusively a consequence of coexistence between local residents. External factors such as the increasing number of people on the streets during weekend nights or during summer months severely increase the chances of expecting a noise incident.

Concentrations and Specialization of Mental Health–Related Calls for Police Service

ABSTRACTOver the past two decades, research has consistently shown that criminal activity concentrates at places. Places also exhibit specialization in criminal activity, largely based on criminal opportunities. However, recent research has also shown that criminal events are only a relatively small fraction of calls for police service, generally 20–30%. The authors investigate the spatial concentrations and spatial specialization of mental health–related calls for police service in a number of municipalities in British Columbia. Overall, the authors find that mental health–related calls are more concentrated in space than criminal events and that specialization relates to social- and health-related services for the mentally ill.

Reducing excessive police incidents: Do notices to owners work?

Many municipalities throughout the United States have enacted ordinances that allow cities to charge property owners fees or fines for excessive police calls for service to the property. However, there are few studies of the outcomes of such ordinances. This study examines the impact on the count of police incidents of a notice of potential future fees or fines to property owners in Anchorage, Alaska and Green Bay, Wisconsin. It was found that police incidents are reduced by 24–28 per cent after a notice of potential fines, with two-thirds of properties experiencing a decline in police incidents post-notice. The implications for policy and practice are discussed.

Calls for police service

In times of austerity and police budget cuts, it is important to understand the demand on the UK police service in order to reduce it effectively. This paper reviews the demand on a division within a police service in England over the period of a year. Utilising police data records, it combined descriptive statistics with content analysis to identify areas of demand. Findings revealed that the majority of the Constabulary’s resources were spent addressing non-traditional police demand. Results indicate that the police could potentially reduce demand for service by enhancing work within two key areas: partnership working and early intervention.

Factors that collate with speed and accuracy in police calls for service: Experimental examination in the simulated scene

Factors that collate with speed and accuracy in police calls for service: Experimental examination in the simulated scene

Policing “The Patch”: Police Response to Rapid Population Growth in Oil Boomtowns in Western North Dakota

This study examines police response to rapid population growth resulting from the oil boom in western North Dakota. This study uses methodological triangulation to examine how rapid population growth has affected the way that police personnel conduct their work and interact with citizens in their communities. Data sources include face-to-face interviews with 101 sworn police personnel working in eight agencies, across four counties in western North Dakota, and examination of official data (including concealed weapons permits, calls for police service, and police personnel). Research findings reveal that the oil boom has caused significant changes to policing in western North Dakota.