Under Pressure: Effects of Police Response Times on Repeat Victimization of Domestic Violence

Victoria Endl-Geyer (ifo institute)
Sofia Amaral (ifo institute)
Helmut Rainer (ifo institute)

Abstract: This paper investigates the causal effect of police response times on decisions re-garding domestic violence incidents. To victims of domestic violence, seeking formal support is costly. When they do so, the quality of initial formal interactions with po-lice emergency response teams may be determinant to victims' cooperation with the police. Using unique administrative data on 911 calls, we find that longer police re-sponse times decrease the likelihood of a repeat victimization report among first-time victims. We also show that longer response times raise legal attrition and lower the stringency of legal actions. To address endogeneity concerns, we exploit case-level variation in response times as a result of exogenous changes in capacity con-straints of officers attending other crimes taking place within the same hour. Our results show that police capacity constraints are determinant to the success of vic-tims' initial engagement with formal support systems.