Abstract
Abstract
Objectives
There
is little scholarship about what affects calls for service, even as they originate the vast majority of police interventions in the USA. We test how racial perceptions, ambiguous situational contexts, and participant demographics affect desire to call the police.
Methods
We conduct a nationwide survey experiment with 2,038 participants, varying vignette racial composition (subjects described as black or white) and seriousness of event (less serious, more ambiguous or more serious, less ambiguous) to test two outcomes: 1) desire to call the police and 2) perceived threat.
Results
Perceived race does not directly affect mean desire to call the police or perceived threat. However, political views moderate the effects of race: compared to politically moderate participants, very liberal participants express less desire to call the police while very conservative participants express more desire to call the police in a vignette featuring young Black men.
Conclusions
The political polarization of desire to call the police raises questions about racially differentiated risk of more serious criminal justice system events, including arrest and incarceration, for racial and ethnic minorities.
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Reference112 articles.
1. Abadie, A., Athey, S., Imbens, G. W., & Wooldridge, J. M. (2023). When Should You Adjust Standard Errors for Clustering? The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 138(1), 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjac038
2. Anderson, E. (1999). Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City. WW Norton & Co.
3. Ansolabehere, S., & Hersh, E. (2017). Validation: What Big Data Reveal About Survey Misreporting and the Real Electorate. Political Analysis, 20(4), 437–459. https://doi.org/10.1093/pan/mps023
4. Antunes, G., & Scott, E. J. (1981). Calling the Cops: Police Telephone Operators and Citizen Calls for Service. Journal of Criminal Justice, 9(2), 165–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/0047-2352(81)90020-9
5. Appiah, K. A. (2019). Was I Right to Call the Cops on a Black Man Breaking Into a Car?. The New York Times, May 7. URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/magazine/was-i-right-to-call-the-cops-on-a-black-man-breaking-into-a-car.html