Date: Monday, October 10, 2022
Time: 12:00pm(noon)-1:15pm
Location: SPP 2202 (and live on Zoom; please contact jboire@umd.edu for info)
Presenter: Greg Midgette (Assistant Professor, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, UMD) with co-authors Thomas Luke Spreen, Brooklynn Hitchens, Lauren Porter, and Peter Reuter
Advocates of police reform suggest that many police activities should be performed by civilian responders but there is presently little empirical evidence on the cost and crime consequences of these proposals.
We present a model to evaluate which emergency calls could be transitioned to civilians based on the risk presented by the event. We then use a rich dataset of community-initiated emergency Calls for Service, their disposition, and the time use of sworn officers of the Baltimore Police Department between 2014 and 2020.
We use a Monte Carlo simulation to estimate the financial and time use implications of transferring calls to civilian first responders. The analysis indicates that nearly half of police service calls could be assigned to civilians contingent on community risk tolerance, as expressed by the probability that the CFS results in a Part 1 crime, while less than two percent of events are erroneously identified as eligible for civilian response and require police response.
The simulation indicates an $8 million annual budget savings to the City of Baltimore and a reduction in police officer time use that is equivalent to an additional 102 full-time officers, or 12 percent of the department’s current patrol personnel. However, uncertainty in key parameters indicates the possibility for potential losses on both dimensions.