Your First Five Crime Studies of February 5
Today's crime studies include work on 911 call diversion
I'm Aaron Jacklin, and this is Explaining Crime, an independent newsletter that helps you explain crime to your audience.
Your First Five is a daily (M-F) series that publishes a curated selection of recent research related to crime and justice. Each post contains links to new studies that I hope will enhance your work explaining crime. Published each weekday at about 7 a.m., E.S.T.
These new criminology and criminal justice studies were published recently by journals I monitor.
1. A Model to Assess the Feasibility of 911 Call Diversion Programs, published in Justice Quarterly. (Open access)
2. Exploring Heterogeneous Effects of Victimization on Changes in Fear of Crime: The Moderating Role of Neighborhood Conditions, published in Justice Quarterly. (Restricted access)
3. The importance of context: re-examining the ‘deployments’ of SWAT teams in Canada, published in Policing and Society. (Restricted access)
4. Sometimes they Come Back: Recidivism and the Adult Imprisonment of Formerly Incarcerated Serious And Violent Juvenile Offenders, published in American Journal of Criminal Justice. (Restricted access)
5. Police Shootings in Canada: An Empirical Analysis and Call for Data, published in Crime & Delinquency. (Open access)
I might cover some of these studies further in Understanding Crime. If one sounds interesting or important, let me know in the comments.
Right now, I'm considering number 1. Here's why:
We develop a model to evaluate which calls could be transitioned to civilian responders based on their crime risk. We use a rich dataset of community-initiated emergency calls to Baltimore Police Department to evaluate the effect of re-tasking based on three call diversion design scenarios. We find that 22 to 57% of 911 calls could be assigned to civilians. We then apply Monte Carlo methods to estimate the financial and time use implications of transferring low risk calls to civilians. Under the most conservative scenario, re-tasking frees police officer time equivalent to 59 additional full-time officers (95% CI: 43 – 75 officers), about nine percent of the Department’s current patrol personnel.