Do we ask the police to do too much?
Yes, say a growing number of community members, city leaders, advocates, and police.
One of the most important reforms that came out of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests was a consensus that whenever possible, cities should send someone other than the police in response to 911 calls about mental illness, drugs, homelessness, and other social problems.
Building those alternative response systems of social workers, mental health professionals, and peer support specialists is a complicated task. It turns out that perhaps the most challenging piece of the puzzle is the work of 911 call takers and dispatchers, who have to make quick decisions based solely on what someone in crisis—or a passerby with limited information—tells them over the telephone. Does the situation need uniformed officers, or would it be better to send someone else?
Sociologist Jessica Gillooly (PhD ’20) has used her deep knowledge of call taking and dispatching, along with some compelling new theoretical ideas, to become one of the leading experts on this issue. Her expertise is helping inform and shape the development of alternative response systems in American cities.
“Police have become the de facto response to every kind of social problem,” Gillooly says. “I’m working with cities to imagine new ways of being responsive to the problems people are calling about.”
Emergencies rarely follow a script, and protocols don’t provide adequate guidance when dispatchers face uncertainty, subjectivity, and unanticipated circumstances."
Jessica Gillooly
Gillooly worked at a 911 call center while pursuing her PhD in sociology and public policy at the Ford School. “Her work combines high-level methodological sophistication with the deep institutional knowledge that comes from true participant-observation ethnography,” says Associate Professor David Thacher, who served as Gillooly’s dissertation chair. “That’s rare.”
Now on faculty at Suffolk University, Gillooly is also a senior fellow at New York University’s Policing Project. Working in partnership with city officials and community leaders, Gillooly and her team aim to reinvent public safety systems. To date, they’ve published findings from Denver, San Francisco, and Tucson.
“Her work has been especially interesting in trying to push past the formulaic approaches that a lot of cities have tried to take to the dispatching problem,” says Thacher, “where they often lay out a rule-based ‘decision tree’ system for deciding who to send.”
That approach is too rigid to capture the complexity of the situations that people are calling about, believes Gillooly. She has drawn on ideas from ethnomethodology and other intellectual traditions to suggest more flexible ways of approaching call taking and dispatch.
“Emergencies rarely follow a script,” Gillooly notes, “and protocols don’t provide adequate guidance when dispatchers face uncertainty, subjectivity, and unanticipated circumstances. As a result, dispatchers too often default to sending the police. In these situations, organizations need to provide more flexible guidance rooted in the expertise, experience, and skill of their workers.”
Gillooly also serves as a 911-call subject matter expert for the ACLU and for the U.S. Department of Justice on a number of its investigations of troubled police departments.
For cities seeking to answer the call for alternatives to police, Gillooly’s got the right expertise at the right time.
By Laura K. Lee (MPP ’96)
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