Criminal Justice Researchers Studied Over 4 Million 911 Calls. Here’s How Their Findings Could Influence Calls for Police Reform – By Josiah Bates (TIME) / Aug 18 2021
Having tracked millions of 911 across 9 U.S. cities over the span of a year, a new study from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences offers new insight into the ongoing discussions surrounding police reform and police officers’ duties.
The study analyzed nine different police agencies in cities both large (with a population over 1 million) and smaller (with under 80,000 residents) and tracked the different kinds of calls made to the police over the year of 2016/2017. In total, around 4.3 million calls were studied.
“The realities behind what motivates people to call the police and the amount of resources spent responding to these calls for service have not been carefully examined across multiple police agencies,” the survey explains. It aims to help correct that shortcoming, with its goal: “to better understand, across a wide range of agencies, the types of calls for service for which officers are dispatched to daily as well as how much time [and resources] they are using to respond to these calls,” Cynthia Lum, director of George Mason University’s Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy and who conducted the study, tells TIME.
Since the murder of George Floyd in particular, there have been widespread calls for the “defunding” of police departments—though with a breadth of interpretations for what that process would actually entail. The study also serves to inform these calls to action, arguing that the defund debate “has generally proceeded without adequate research about either the scale or nature of issues that the police handle and the potential consequences of the proposed reform efforts.”
CONTINUE > https://time.com/6090633/911-calls-criminal-justice-study-defund-police/
