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Major
Public Health
Anticipated Graduation Year
2022
Access Type
Open Access
Abstract
Recent social movements popularized policy changes like defunding the police and police abolition, and Americans are increasingly questioning whether our current conceptions of public safety and first response systems require their current hyper-dependence on police. Policing in emergency response has become an argument of appropriateness and cost-effectiveness. Public service resources are misused, as suggested by evidence of the negative effects of over-policing on communities of color, the growing prevalence of police brutality, and the net ineffectiveness of police-centric emergency response programs. Not only are these response systems logistically ineffective, but research suggests that current metropolitan response services unnecessarily hemorrhage tax dollars in their fight to maintain dependence on police. This study compares the attribution of resources within 15 metropolitan emergency response systems to and predicts their resource attribution if they were to adopt three alternative evidence-based emergency response models. By quantifying the resource waste of current emergency response systems, this study bolsters the argument for reshaping policing within first response.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Quantifying Resource Waste Within Over-Policed Emergency Response Systems
Recent social movements popularized policy changes like defunding the police and police abolition, and Americans are increasingly questioning whether our current conceptions of public safety and first response systems require their current hyper-dependence on police. Policing in emergency response has become an argument of appropriateness and cost-effectiveness. Public service resources are misused, as suggested by evidence of the negative effects of over-policing on communities of color, the growing prevalence of police brutality, and the net ineffectiveness of police-centric emergency response programs. Not only are these response systems logistically ineffective, but research suggests that current metropolitan response services unnecessarily hemorrhage tax dollars in their fight to maintain dependence on police. This study compares the attribution of resources within 15 metropolitan emergency response systems to and predicts their resource attribution if they were to adopt three alternative evidence-based emergency response models. By quantifying the resource waste of current emergency response systems, this study bolsters the argument for reshaping policing within first response.