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Evidence of the Effect of Police Violence on Citizen Crime Reporting

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By carefully examining our original data and models, Zoorob identified a potential outlier that should be scrutinized when evaluating our findings. We thank him for raising this important point and… Click to show full abstract

By carefully examining our original data and models, Zoorob identified a potential outlier that should be scrutinized when evaluating our findings. We thank him for raising this important point and for engaging in collaborative, problem-solving research. Examining Zoorob’s analysis provided us the opportunity to return to our original study. We began by thinking about his first point: the raw data show that crime-related 911 calls did not appear to fall after the local press reported on Jude’s vicious beating by police officers. The Jude story was published in February, when both crime and crime reporting were at their lowest points of the year. (The enduring seasonal nature of crime has been empirically established at least since the eighteenth century [Anderson 2001; Field 1992; Hipp et al. 2004].) As temperatures warmed in subsequent weeks, crime increased but crime reporting did not rise at the same rate. That crime-related calls remained somewhat flat from January to March, despite a rise in recorded lawbreaking, suggests that the rate of 911 calls per crime decreased. This basic insight encouraged us to more directly control for the seasonal nature of crime.1 Accordingly, we estimated models that excluded the outlier Zoorob identified but controlled for average weekly temperature, as well as month and block-group fixed effects, as in our original specification.2 Doing so better enabled us to juxtapose rates of 911 calls during weeks with similar weather conditions and avoid comparing cooler days to hotter ones that see more crime. In Table 1, we report the results of these new models. Using AIC and BIC to guide model selection, we found that our revised models provide a better balance between fit and parsimony than our original model and those developed by Zoorob. Model 3 includes a quadratic post-Jude trend, as in the first two models. Model 4 includes a linear post-Jude trend.3 The third model of Table 1—which excludes the outlier week and controls for weekly temperatures—reports a negative linear term for the post-Jude period (p < .001) and a small, positive quadratic term (p < .01). Figure 1 plots the estimates from Model 3, showing that 911 calls declined initially following the Jude story before returning to expected levels a few months later. Likewise, Model 4 reports a significant linear decline in crime-related 911 calls following Jude’s story. These models (neither of which include the outlier week) indicate that crime-related 911 calls were much lower than expected in Milwaukee neighborhoods following news reports of Jude’s beating. The results are highly consistent with our original findings, reflected in the first column of the table. 895979 ASRXXX10.1177/0003122419895979American Sociological ReviewDesmond et al. research-article2020

Keywords: crime reporting; crime related; model; 911 calls; jude; crime

Journal Title: American Sociological Review
Year Published: 2020

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