Quoctrung Bui
Adrian Spencer, a Milwaukee
resident, belongs to a community group trying to improve public safety and
relations with the police. CreditDarren Hauck for The New York Times
MILWAUKEE — Milwaukee residents
were outraged when they learned, about three months after the fact, that a
biracial man at a party had been severely beaten by several white off-duty
police officers also in attendance. The man, Frank Jude, was left with a broken
nose, bruises and severe bleeding in his ears, a result of having pens pushed
into them.
The attack, which took place in
October 2004 and came to light after an article in The Milwaukee Journal
Sentinel, prompted protests. In the fallout, nine officers were fired by the
Milwaukee Police Department; three were eventually convicted on federal charges
of violating Mr. Jude’s civil rights.
It also, according to new
research, led to a drop in 911 calls in Milwaukee notifying the police of
crimes.
The lag between Mr. Jude’s
beating and its becoming widely known created a particularly good natural
experiment for a team of sociologists interested in learning whether mistrust
of the police can play a role in a community’s reluctance to report crimes. The
results may also influence debate over the effect that wider dissemination of
instances of police violence, which can now be recorded on cellphone video and
spread quickly via the internet, might have on fighting crime.
In a new paper in the American
Sociological Review, the sociologists Matthew Desmond of Harvard, Andrew V.
Papachristos of Yale and David S. Kirk of Oxford have drawn a direct link
between widely publicized acts of police violence and the number of 911 calls
neighborhoods make.
The lag between when Mr. Jude was
attacked and when it became widely known allowed the researchers to isolate the
episode’s effect on 911 calls. The researchers pored over 110,000 such calls in
Milwaukee, one year before and one year after the beating. The researchers
estimated that 17 percent (or 22,000) fewer calls were made than would have
been likely if the attack had never happened. They found that the effect lasted
roughly one year.
Mr. Desmond said that the results
“kind of blew us away; we weren’t expecting to see such a big effect and an
effect to last so long.”
The effect broke along racial
lines: The majority of the decline in calls took place in black neighborhoods.
“It shows what a deep rift events like this cause in the social fabric, in
predominately black communities,” Mr. Desmond said.
An abandoned home, a magnet for
drugs and prostitution, became a target of crime-fighting efforts in Milwaukee.
CreditDarren Hauck for The New York Times
Such events didn’t need to be
local to have an impact. The researchers also looked at how the volume of calls
to 911 in Milwaukee changed after news accounts of police violence in other,
distant cities. In one of the other two cases they studied, they found a
significant impact on crime reporting.
The change in calls is unusual
because the relationship between crime and calls to the police is typically
strong. “If crime is going up in Milwaukee, calls should also be going up,” Mr.
Papachristos said.
The advantage of using 911 data
is that it’s somewhat of a hybrid between survey and administrative data. With
surveys, the best a researcher can do is ask what a person might do in a given
situation; it’s not clear whether what people say in a survey will match with
what they’ll actually do in real life. The record of 911 calls, by contrast, is
data created by residents in their moment of need.
“This is derived from what people
are doing — it won’t be as biased as crime reports,” Mr. Papachristos said.
“This is the first time that we’ve seen a result in citizen activity.”
It’s not as if people are silent
when a crime takes place. Quite the opposite: News spreads fast from house to
house.
“Residents are very willing to
tell you about what’s happening in their neighborhood,” said Adrian Spencer,
who at one point lived in a predominately black neighborhood in central
Milwaukee across the street from a tavern that had become a magnet for fights,
drag races and shootings. “But it’s much more difficult to get them to talk
directly to the police. Or come to a hearing.”
To Ms. Spencer’s surprise, she
and her mother seemed to be the only ones calling 911 to report crime connected
with the tavern. When she asked other people in the neighborhood, some of whom
had lived there longer than she had, the usual response was: What were the
police going to do?
She suspects this reluctance to
call is rooted in skepticism that law enforcement can make much of a difference
or be fair to the residents. “There’s a huge fear of retaliation,” she said.
“It’s not happening on the level that they’re thinking that it is. And then you
look on TV and you see what’s happening on TV with the police, you definitely
don’t want to come in contact with the police if you don’t have to.”
The new study focuses only on
data that is 12 years old and primarily focused on Milwaukee. But Mr. Desmond
says that the effect may also be true elsewhere: “I think it has implications
for what we’re seeing in Cleveland, in Charlotte, in Baltimore, with very
publicized cases of police violence. Milwaukee is similar to places like
Baltimore and Cleveland in its level of segregation. I think that probably has
a lot to do with the story. ”
Researchers have estimated that
something changed in how often Milwaukee residents called 911 in early 2005,
especially in black neighborhoods. Around that time, news broke of an earlier
attack by police officers on a biracial man.
Neighborhood underreporting
offers another possible explanation. In an effort to explain rising homicide
rates, some police chiefs have saidthat the publicity and backlash surrounding
highly publicized episodes in places like Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore have
increased the brazenness of criminals. Others, such as James Comey, the F.B.I.
director, have suggested it stems from the reluctance of police officers to
patrol as aggressively because they fear becoming the subject of the next viral
video. The new study may shed more light on whether the increase in crime last
year was part of a deepening skepticism that the police can make a difference
in already violent neighborhoods.
Chief Edward A. Flynn of the
Milwaukee police doesn’t see the connection. He says that calls for service are
up in Milwaukee.
He says the researchers’ data
were affected by a quirk in how Milwaukee handled its 911 calls. Until three
years ago, 911 calls were initially received by the county and then passed
along to the city. Chief Flynn says many calls were dropped before they reached
the city, but after the Police Department had sent an officer.
“Too often, researchers are doing
mass data dumps without field research,” he said. “They’re taking metadata and
extrapolating.”
Mr. Desmond says that they were
careful to incorporate “administrative considerations that lead to underreporting
of calls” and that they worked with a sergeant in the Milwaukee Police
Department’s open records section on those issues. Also, Mr. Desmond says that
none of the details Chief Flynn mentioned would address the differences in
crime reporting between black and white neighborhoods.
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Whatever the causes, there are
hints that neighborhoods can have a change of heart. The turning point for Ms.
Spencer came four years ago, when 18 bullets were fired at her home and the
beauty shop beside her house, striking her room and her daughter’s room. She
began to hold meetings to discuss the tavern and crime in her neighborhood more
generally. Eventually, after two years of effort, she persuaded the city to
revoke the tavern’s liquor license.
She went on to become a community
organizer for Safe & Sound, a group that tries to increase communication
between the police and vulnerable neighborhoods in Milwaukee. “There’s always
going to be people who are more comfortable talking with me, because I grew up
here — I’m a civilian,” Ms. Spencer said.
She trains people to follow up
with the police, how to appropriately address negative interactions with them
and how to pass on tips when they prefer to stay anonymous. Still, she says
many of the 75 to 80 people she meets every month have a hard time opening up.
“It’s a tough, tough thing to
do,” she said. “Rightfully so, because people have these experiences that they
fall back on. For most people, the type of interactions they’ve had with the
police have been negative interactions.”
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