Why black areas aren’t dialing 911
New research shows that police violence has led to drop in reporting crime
MILWAUKEE, WIS.— Milwaukee residents were outraged when they learned, about three months after the fact, that a biracial man at a party had been severely beaten by several white off-duty police officers also in attendance. The man, Frank Jude, was left with a broken nose, bruises and severe bleeding in his ears, a result of having pens pushed into them.
The attack, which took place in October 2004 and came to light after an article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, prompted protests. In the fallout, nine officers were fired by the Milwaukee Police Department; three were eventually convicted on federal charges of violating Jude’s civil rights.
It also, according to new research, led to a drop in 911calls in Milwaukee notifying the police of crimes.
The lag between Jude’s beating and its becoming widely known created a particularly good natural experiment for a team of sociologists interested in learning whether mistrust of the police can play a role in a community’s reluctance to report crimes. The results may also influ- ence debate over the effect that wider dissemination of instances of police violence, which can now be recorded on cellphone video and spread quickly via the Internet, might have on fighting crime.
In a new paper in the American Sociology Review, sociologists Matthew Desmond of Harvard, Andrew V. Papachristos of Yale and David S. Kirk of Oxford have drawn a direct link between widely publicized acts of police violence and the number of 911 calls neighbourhoods make. The time between when Jude was attacked and when it became widely known allowed the researchers to isolate the episode’s effect on 911 calls. The researchers pored over 110,000 such calls in Milwaukee, one year before and one year after the beating. The researchers estimated that 17-per-cent (or 22,000) fewer calls were made than would have been likely if the attack had never happened. They found that the effect lasted roughly one year.
Desmond said the results “kind of blew us away; we weren’t expecting to see such a big effect and an effect to last so long.” The effect broke along racial lines: the majority of the decline in calls took place in black neighbourhoods. “It shows what a deep rift events like this cause in the social fabric, in predominately black communities,” Desmond said.
Such events didn’t need to be local to have an effect. The researchers also looked at how the volume of calls to 911 in Milwaukee changed after news accounts of police violence in other, distant cities. In one of the other two cases they studied, they found a significant impact on crime reporting. The change in calls is unusual because the relationship between crime and calls to police is typically strong. “If crime is going up in Milwaukee, calls should also be going up,” Papachristos said.
It’s not as if people are silent when a crime takes place: news spreads fast from house to house.
“Residents are very willing to tell you about what’s happening in their neighbourhood,” said Adrian Spencer, a community organizer for Safe & Sound, a group that tries to increase communication between the police and vulnerable neighbourhoods in Milwaukee. “But it’s much more difficult to get them to talk directly to the police.”