A Model to Assess the Feasibility of 911 Call Diversion Programs

Reforms to deploy civilian responders to non-criminal emergency calls may reduce demands on police departments and reduce negative interactions between police and civilians, but there is presently little empirical evidence on the feasibility of these proposals. We develop a model to evaluate which calls could be transitioned to civilian responders based on their crime risk. We use a rich dataset of community-initiated emergency calls to Baltimore Police Department to evaluate the effect of re-tasking based on three call diversion design scenarios. We find that 22 to 57% of 911 calls could be assigned to civilians. We then apply Monte Carlo methods to estimate the financial and time use implications of transferring low risk calls to civilians. Under the most conservative scenario, re-tasking frees police officer time equivalent to 59 additional full-time officers (95% CI: 43 – 75 officers), about nine percent of the Department’s current patrol personnel.