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The Effect of a Death-in-Police-Custody Incident on Community Reliance on the Police

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Abstract

Objectives

Examine whether a death-in-police-custody incident affected community reliance on the police, as measured through citizen calls requesting police assistance for non-criminal caretaking matters.

Methods

This study used Baltimore Police Department (BPD) incident-level call data (2014–2017) concerning non-criminal caretaking matters (N = 234,781). Counts of non-criminal caretaking calls were aggregated by week for each of 279 unique sections derived from census-tract and police district boundaries. This study devised a Negative Community–Police Relationship Index Score that operationalized the expected risk of a negative community–police relationship for each of the sections. In April 2015, a Baltimore resident, Freddie Gray, died while in BPD custody. A Poisson regression model assessed whether this high-profile death-in-police-custody incident adversely affected the volume of non-criminal caretaking calls to the police and whether that effect was strongest in sections at a high risk of a negative community–police relationship. A falsification test used pocket-dialed emergency calls to verify that any observed trends were not the result of overall telephone usage.

Results

There was no statistical evidence that the death-in-police-custody incident produced any changes in community reliance on the police for non-criminal caretaking matters, even in high-risk sections. A supplemental analysis using calls for criminal matters yielded similar results. As the falsification test demonstrated, the observed trends were not the result of overall telephone usage.

Conclusions

Despite a divisive death-in-police-custody incident, citizens were still willing to enlist police assistance. More broadly, the caretaking role of the police may be an important mechanism to strengthen community–police relations, particularly in marginalized neighborhoods vulnerable to strained community–police relations.

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Notes

  1. Also, a citizen is more likely to be satisfied with a police encounter where the police are perceived as fair, polite, and communicative (Skogan 2005). As a recent randomized controlled trial found, positive police-citizen interactions in the form of brief door-to-door non-law enforcement visits significantly improved citizens’ attitudes towards the police (Peyton et al. 2019).

  2. According to some observers, the BPD, post-2015, may have engaged in de-policing (Rector 2017; Oppel 2015; Morgan and Pally 2016; Heath 2018; U.S. Department of Justice 2016). Police officers generally learn about criminal activity either through their own observations or through citizen reports to them (Black 1973).

  3. The total data from the BPD website contained over 9000 distinct call reasons that could be separated into categories that also included, for example: “Death,” “Custody/Visitation,” “Elopement/Medical Facility Problems,” “Noise/Animal or Vehicle Disturbance,” and “Dangerous Driving/Road Rage.”

  4. This category excludes calls about a child or pet locked in a vehicle given that these calls may involve a citizen reporting potential criminal activity such as neglect.

  5. This category excludes lost or missing children, runaways, or adults reported as “missing.”

  6. According to 2016 Maryland Department of Transportation data, 77.3% of motor vehicle accidents in Baltimore involved only property damage; 22.7% percent involved an injury, and less than 1% involved a fatality (Maryland State Police 2017). Compared to other accidents, in these property-damage-only accidents, motorists likely have more discretion as to whether they contact the police. As an additional matter, prior research about motor vehicle accidents in Baltimore City has found that no association between socioeconomic variables of accident locations and accident incident density (Dezman et al. 2016).

  7. Consistent with prior research, the percentage of vacant residential housing units provides an indication of visible disadvantage in a neighborhood (Kondo et al. 2015; Wiebe et al. 2013).

  8. For two of the 279 sections, some demographic indicators were missing. Census data from 2010 was therefore used (City of Baltimore 2010).

  9. As a preliminary matter, a factor analysis was conducted to determine the extent to which these five demographic indicators are highly correlated with each other, thereby loading on the same factor (Sampson et al. 1997). A factor analysis sets out to determine the relationship among observed, correlated variables with the recognition that at least some of these variables together may constitute a single (or, at a minimum, a smaller number of) latent or unobserved factors (Maruyama and Ryan 2014).

    The resulting correlation coefficients among the five indicators were (Black = 0.76, Poverty = 0.72, Vacant Residential Housing Units = 0.63, Unemployed = 0.87, and Aged 12–25 = 0.08). The Aged 12–25 indicator is not strongly correlated with the other indicators. Nonetheless, it is retained in calculating the risk index score; even if the remaining four indicators are more strongly correlated with each other (and, in the aggregate, constitute a factor), it is possible that age is still relevant to the risk of a negative relationship with the police. As a robustness check, however, an alternate index score was computed, and the full analysis was re-run with the age indicator omitted from the index score.

  10. A factor analysis showed that the Aged 12–25 indicator was not strongly correlated with the other indicators. Nonetheless, it was retained in calculating the risk index score. As a robustness check, an alternate index score was computed, and the full analysis was re-run with the age indicator omitted from the index score. The significance levels do not change.

  11. Similarly, this analysis uses a relatively small geographic unit for which demographic characteristics are available. To that extent, the analysis minimizes the possibility of an ecological fallacy—namely that it uses area-level characteristics to draw conclusions about individual-level behavior (Ackerman and Rossmo, 2015). Nonetheless, individual-level data may be particularly valuable to future research assessing public willingness to rely on the police and the community caretaking role.

  12. Certainly, controversies surrounding police behavior, especially within the context of race, have troubled American society throughout much of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The 1967 President’s Crime Commission report noted difficulties with police-community relations, particularly in marginalized urban neighborhoods (President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice 1967). Nonetheless, social media and the increasing presence of social-media supportive technology (e.g., smartphones with improved video-recording capabilities) have facilitated an instantaneous dissemination of ideas, visual images, and emotions in a way traditional media, including online news sources, had been inherently incapable of doing (Gallagher et al. 2018; Ince et al. 2017; Bock 2016; Brown 2015). To that extent, understanding citizen judgments about police conduct has become especially relevant.

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks Greg Ridgeway, John M. MacDonald, and the JQC reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. She also thanks the University of Pennsylvania Urban Studies Program for the opportunity to present this research as part of the Graduate Colloquium series.

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  1. Department of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania, McNeil Building, 3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA, 19104-6286, USA

    Ruth A. Moyer

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Correspondence to Ruth A. Moyer.

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Moyer, R.A. The Effect of a Death-in-Police-Custody Incident on Community Reliance on the Police. J Quant Criminol 38, 459–482 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-021-09504-x

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