It has long been hypothesized that instances of police violence lead to a decrease in 911 calls, particularly in large urban communities, due to mistrust of law enforcement. However, until recently, there hasn’t been high-quality research that supports this assumption. A new study from Brown University’s Orlando Bravo Center for Economic Research has changed this.
Jesse Bruhn, along with research collaborators Desmond Ang, Panka Bencsik and Ellora Derenoncourt, published a paper, “Community Engagement with Law Enforcement after High-Profile Acts of Police Violence,” in American Economic Review: Insights that addresses the relationship between community interactions with law enforcement and incidents of police violence in a novel and rigorous manner.
“There’s a long history in social science of trying to understand how high-profile acts of police violence shape the way communities engage with law enforcement,” said Bruhn, “And the way people have studied this in the past has been to look at the volume of 911 calls for service in the aftermath of high-profile acts of police violence.”
But there is a fundamental problem with this approach: even if researchers observe a significant decline in 911 calls, they cannot determine whether this decrease reflects a reluctance to report crimes or a genuine decline in the crime rate.
Bruhn called this a “confounding problem” that complicates the interpretation of the results. “It could be that after an act of police violence, people are less likely to report crimes, but it could be that they are less likely to commit crimes,” he explained.
Previous literature on the issue showed mixed results. “Some studies looking at 911 calls found large declines after police violence,” said Bruhn, “other studies concluded that there was no change. There was no clear consensus in the literature on this issue.”
Bruhn and his team found a novel solution to this conundrum. Rather than merely documenting 911 calls, the team analyzed call-to-shot ratios — the ratio of 911 calls to shots fired in a specific area.
“As it turns out,” said Bruhn, “in many major U.S. cities, they’ve installed acoustic gunshot detection systems.” These systems are designed to detect gunshot sounds and, using sensors to triangulate the sound’s origin, notify police of the time and location of a gunshot within seconds.
The technology itself is controversial. Supporters claim that it improves law enforcement response times, enabling police to assist victims more quickly and recover evidence before it is lost, while also providing a clearer picture of crime in specific neighborhoods. Critics maintain that it is ineffective and reproduces systematic biases, leading to overpolicing of marginalized communities.
Those controversies aside, Bruhn and his research team were able to utilize data from it to answer the persistent question of whether incidents of police violence led to a decline in 911 calls or a reduction in crime.
The results were clear. The researchers documented a decrease in the volume of 911 calls coupled with an increase in gunshots fired in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder across 13 major U.S. cities. This finding establishes, for the first time, a correlation between incidents of police violence and 911 call volume.