How 911 callers and call‐takers impact police encounters with the public: The case of the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12508
• Date: 01 August 2020
• Published date: 01 August 2020
• Author: Jessica W. Gillooly

DOI: ./- .

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH IN POLICE POLICY AND PRACTICE

How 911 callers and call-takers impact police

encounters with the public: The case of the

Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest

Jessica W. Gillooly Ph.D.1,2

New YorkUniversity School of Law

University of Michigan, Departments of

Sociology and Public Policy

Correspondence

JessicaW. Gillooly,Policing Project at NYU

Schoolof Law— Washington Square S,

NewYork, NY .

Email:Jessica.gillooly@nyu.edu

Theauthor is extremely grateful for

theinvaluablecommentsfromSteve

Clayman,David Thacher, Barry Friedman,

AlexRalph, Jeffrey Morenoff, Geoffrey

Raymond,Kevin Whitehead, and Amelia

Hillon the analysis and writing contained

here.

Research Summary: The Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest

provides an illuminating case study to show how the

omission of dispatch in police reform conversations lim-

its our understanding of police officer action. Using con-

versation analysis, this article analyzes the  call and

radio transmission from the Gates incident to dissect the

function of the  call-taker, and their impact on polic-

ing in the field. This analysis shines light on a previ-

ously overlooked call-taker function—risk appraisal—

and concretely shows how the call-taker played a piv-

otal role in escalating the caller’s uncertainty and, thus,

primed the responding officer for a more aggressive

encounter.

Policy Implications: Through unpacking precisely

how the call-taker appraised risk—namely through

extraction, interpretation, and classification of caller

information—this article provides a framework to eval-

uate call-taker actions. The findings suggest the need for

training that instructs call-takers to assess risk in more

sophisticated ways. Preserving uncertainty may reduce

the overestimation or underestimation of incidents and

improve future police encounters with the public.

KEYWORDS

conversation analysis, dispatch, police contact, risk assessment

Criminology & Public Policy. ;:–. ©  American Society of Criminology 787wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/capp

788 GILLOOLY

Contemporary policing in America is facing serious issues surrounding the level and distribution

of encounters and arrests, infringements on civil liberties, and the use of force. Tensionsbetween

law enforcement and the public are at historically high levels (J. Jones, ). A series of officer-

involved killings in places like Ferguson, Staten Island, Cleveland, and Chicago have spurred an

entire social movement against police brutality.

Much criminology scholarship attributes these various and sundry challenges to police officers’

decisions about where to patrol, who to stop, and how to treat community members. Extensive

research on proactive policing documents racial and socioeconomic disparities in how officers

exercise discretion in stops and arrests. Thanks to scholars like Victor Rios (),Alice Goffman

(), JeffreyFagan (Fagan, Braga, Brunson, & Pattavina,; Gelman, Fagan, & Kiss, ), and

Bernard Harcourt (), we now understand how individual officer-level decisions can produce

and reproduce racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

By contrast, reactive or call-driven policing has not received comparable scholarly attention.

The neglect of the features of reactive mobilization produces a limited understanding of polic-

ing because police often are acting in response to telephone calls from individuals requesting

police services. In , of an estimated . million U.S. residents who had one or morecontacts

with the police, more than half ( million) requested police services (Langton & Durose, ).

Requests come from callers who can be uncertain, biased, legally uninformed, or all of these in

combination.

Calls to summon the police can result in arrest and the use of force because responding offi-

cers primarily are trained in law enforcement and force (Friedman, ). It is difficult to assess

the most serious risks associated with police mobilization because of a lack of complete national

statistics on use of force. Former police detective Nick Selby and co-authors help fill this knowl-

edge gap by calculating the prevalence of the gravestpolicing outcome—police killings. They f ind

that  of the  national police killings of unarmed civilians in  began with a  call (Selby,

Singleton, Flosi, & Bruce, ).

Reviewing local police department reports, albeit a piecemeal approach, further highlights how

some of the most grievous forms of policing develop, not from officer-initiated encounters but

from the public’s calls to . In a reviewof  officer-involved shootings (OISs) between  and

 in the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police, analysts found that % of OISs originated from a call

and only % from officer-initiated contact (Stewart, Fachner, King, & Rickman, ). A 

comprehensive review of  use-of-force incidents among officers in the Spokane Police Depart-

ment found that % stemmed from a dispatch, whereas only % stemmed from officer-initiated

contact (Spokane Police Department Office of Professional Accountability, ). Unlike in the

case of proactive policing in which individual officer discretion primarily shapes the encounter,

the statistics above hint that incident trajectory may be more contingent on the nature of caller

requests and the ways in which  call-takers handle them than current criminology literature

implies.

This article dissects the function of the  call-taker and illuminates theirimpact on policing in

the field. By conducting a fine-grained analysis of the high-profile Henry Louis Gates Jr. case, the

article uncovers a previously overlooked call-taker function—risk appraisal. Through unpacking

precisely how call-takers appraise risk—namely through extraction, interpretation, and classifi-

cation of caller information—a framework is provided to evaluate call-taker actions. The Gates

case shines a particularly bright light on the challenges and dilemmas that can arise during the

risk appraisal process. These findings are an important step in identifying ways in which police

departments can pursue more intelligent policies inside dispatch.