Making the call: how does perceived race affect desire to call the police?

Objectives: There is little scholarship about what affects calls for service, even as they originate the vast majority of police interventions in the USA. We test how racial perceptions, ambiguous situational contexts, and participant demographics affect desire to call the police.

Methods: We conduct a nationwide survey experiment with 2,038 participants, varying vignette racial composition (subjects described as black or white) and seriousness of event (less serious, more ambiguous or more serious, less ambiguous) to test two outcomes: 1) desire to call the police and 2) perceived threat.

How to Think about Criminal Justice Reform: Conceptual and Practical Considerations.

How can we improve the effectiveness of criminal justice reform efforts? Effective reform hinges on shared understandings of what the problem is and shared visions of what success looks like. But consensus is hard to come by, and there has long been a distinction between "policy talk" or how problems are defined and solutions are promoted, and "policy action" or the design and adoption of certain policies. In this essay, we seek to promote productive thinking and talking about, as well as designing of, effective and sustainable criminal justice reforms.