Against the Clock? the Unintended Effects of Rapid Police Response Time on Domestic Violence

Abstract: This paper investigates the effects of police response times on repeat victimization in domestic violence. Given that rapid response policing has been shown to increase the likelihood and severity of criminal sanctions against offenders, theory offers two opposing views on the direction of the effects for repeat victimization of domestic violence. Standard economic theories of crime predict that rapid response policing might have a deterrence effect: by resulting in tougher sanctions for an initially committed act of domestic violence, it may prevent offenders from re-victimizing their partners in the future. Yet, it is also possible that rapid response policing causes a backlash effect: by increasing the likelihood of criminal sanctions, such as arrest, it may increase the risk of retaliatory violence by perpetrators, whereby the frequency of and severity of future domestic violence episodes increases. With these two competing hypotheses in mind, we examine how rapid response policing affect domestic violence domestic violence dynamics. Using unique administrative data on 911 calls in the UK for a period of seven years, we show that a 10 percent longer police response times decrease the likelihood of repeat victimization by 4 percent. We also find that longer response times increase the stringency of legal actions. To establish causality, we exploit call-level variation in response times due to exogenous changes in capacity constraints of officers attending other crimes taking place in the hour prior to the call.