This study is the first to empirically examine how a suspect's race and ethnicity influences the police dispatch process. Call-takers and dispatchers, the first to handle emergency and non-emergency calls, assign incident codes, assess priority, and dispatch assistance based on urgency and skills required. While anecdotal evidence suggests bias in these decisions, little is known about its scope and how it could be influencing police behavior. Using police administrative data from Columbus, Ohio, I examine if call classification, prioritization, and subsequent police resource allocation differs when the suspect involved is non-white or Hispanic, compared to a white individual. To identify the causal impact of race, I compare dispatch outcomes by race within semantically similar calls from the same neighborhood. I leverage text-based call remarks noted by call-takers and use natural language processing methods to group calls that are similar in context and severity. Focusing on calls that potentially involve a gun threat, I find that dispatch officials are more likely to assign high-threat police codes (e.g., “person with a gun” or “shooting”) and urgent priority to similar calls involving non-white individuals compared to white individuals -- a pattern that holds across domestic conflicts, mental health and suicide crisis calls, wellness checks, and public disturbances. Notably, while this high-threat classification results in immediate and heavy deployment of police resources, it does not result in higher rates of arrest or use-of-force, suggesting that racial bias in dispatch decisions leads to a misallocation of police resources.

The 911 line is a primary point of contact between the police and the public, where requests of every kind are routed to the police by default. We investigate when people are willing to relocate their requests to alternatives. Evidence from a survey experiment shows that exposure to a website listing community services reduces support for police responses in nonviolent but not violent incidents. Administrative data from Columbus, where two-thirds of all calls arrive through the city’s nonemergency line, provide real-world evidence: Exploiting quasi-random assignment of calls to calltakers, we find that higher priority designation increases arrests only for those 911 calls with no alternative response. A survey and field experiment with law enforcement stakeholders show that they are skeptical of police alternatives and favor police responses far more than civilians do. Police institutions may be a greater constraint than public demand on the reallocation of police services

Police-clinician co-response is expanding for behavioral crises, but evidence of impact is limited. We evaluate Columbus, Ohio’s Mobile Crisis Response (MCR) program, five citywide police–social worker teams that, due to binding capacity, served only 7–8% of eligible mental health 911 calls. Leveraging random variation in response capacity and detailed data on police dispatch, use-of-force, arrests, and involuntary transports, we estimate LATEs that describe impacts on healthcare linkage, downside risks of violence, 911 utilization, city costs, and spillovers to precinct-level officer efficiency. We find meaningful impacts of MCR co-response on time use and healthcare contacts. MCR teams take longer than traditional police to arrive but spend substantially more time on scene after dispatch. MCR response also increases the likelihood of medical transport to crisis-appropriate facilities, including private psychiatric hospitals and emergency departments with psychiatric units. Overall, we detect no effect of MCR response on involuntary transport, arrest, or jailing, but find significant heterogeneity in program impacts by call severity and neighborhood socioeconomic context. While the program increases rather than decreases short- and medium-run city costs, it also reduces burden on traditional police officers, who provide faster response times to lower-priority calls within their precinct after local co-response. No impact is observed on repeat 911 engagement.

India’s Public Distribution System (PDS) is the largest food-based social safety net in the world, and many in India argue that it should be universalized rather than targeted based on household income. We use a natural experiment to ask whether universalizing PDS in the Indian state of Odisha improved access to PDS entitlements and ultimately women’s health. In 2008, the Odisha government simultaneously increased PDS entitlements and universalized access to the PDS in the particularly poor Kalahandi-Balangir-Koraput (KBK) region. In the rest of the state, the government increased PDS entitlements for poor households in an equivalent manner, but did not universalize PDS. We exploit this variation in reform implementation and find that while universalization had little effect on women's health (BMI) in above poverty line households, it improved health in below poverty line households. We also examine the mechanisms that drive these improvements in health.