Database and Methods

The research agenda we have outlined requires a close look at the inner workings and practices of police departments during the era when the call-for-service system took root. Wherever possible, we did not simply study policy decisions and public statements about policing but investigated how those policies and statements translated into everyday practice inside police departments and in the field. The sources we relied on were selected because they helped us to do that.

The most important archival records we relied on came from studies conducted by external organizations and consultants that had investigated police operations in multiple cities throughout the United States, particularly (but not exclusively) the Public Administration Service (PAS) and the American Bar Foundation (ABF).Footnote ¹ In the middle decades of the twentieth century, these influential and widely known organizations assembled detailed reports about internal practices and procedures of various government departments and agencies, including the police. The intensive ABF studies of dozens of police departments in Kansas, Michigan, and Wisconsin in the mid-1950s, in particular, provide a uniquely detailed picture of actual policing practices, aiming to illuminate the day-to-day administration of justice (Walker Reference Walker1992); importantly, they do that in rural, urban, and suburban jurisdictions that span four states.Footnote ² The field notes collected for the ABF studies remain a dramatically underutilized window into the mid-twentieth-century criminal justice system, presumably because access to them remains heavily restricted due to the agreements researchers made with the agencies they studied. (Nearly seventy years after the original research, ABF documents must still be viewed on-site at the Wisconsin Historical Society archives and cannot be photocopied.) The consultant reports by the Public Administration Service (PAS) and other influential consultants provide less detailed accounts of the cities they studied, but they add context and reveal details for dozens more cities throughout the United States. While those reports must be read with a critical awareness of the reform agenda the consultants were pursuing, many of their observations appear to be relatively unambiguous; where possible, we have tried to corroborate them with other sources, such as agency documents and newspaper reports.

We supplement these research studies and consultant reports with a wide range of other relevant municipal documents, including reports issued by police departments and finance commissions, police department communications training manuals, testimonies to the Federal Communications Commission, minutes from the annual International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) meetings, newspaper coverage, and the prescriptive police management literature. We assembled this somewhat eclectic body of materials through traditional strategies for historical research—by following leads from the references contained in other primary and secondary sources, by searching historical archives known to us that contained policing material, and by conducting focused searches of digital databases (particularly WorldCat and HathiTrust) to identify documents that discussed the development and use of the new communications technologies in policing. We then gathered these materials through in-person visits and remote requests to multiple archives and libraries across the United States. We cite the documents we relied on for this analysis in our bibliography (though we also consulted dozens of other documents that proved less useful and do not appear in our reference list). We inductively coded these archival records for concepts and themes that characterized the ways in which police agencies understood, processed, and responded to calls for police service from the public, including the changing organizational location of call response and the considerations that governed it.

We will describe the emergence of the call-for-service system as a national story, though we will also note relevant variations across the cities we studied. We frame our narrative that way for two reasons. First, to an important degree, reform actors who performed on the national stage had an important impact on the adoption of new communications technologies throughout the country. As others have noted (for example, Carte and Carte Reference Carte and Carte1975; Fogelson Reference Fogelson1977; Walker Reference Walker1979), after the beginning of the twentieth century, police reform in the United States increasingly came under the influence of an emergent professional community that was national in scope: organizations like the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) provided a forum for professional discussion and interaction, reform groups like the PAS pursued a distinctive reform agenda throughout the United States, and prominent chiefs such as August Vollmer and O.W. Wilson became recognized national leaders. Part of our analysis focuses on the more-or-less coherent agenda that this emerging national professional community pursued in the area of police communications, including the agenda pursued by Wilson, PAS, and their associates. Another part, however, investigates the actual (often unintended) consequences of that agenda by tracing the way myriad police departments throughout the United States absorbed and implemented it—particularly the departments that the ABF studied in the mid-1950s, but also the departments investigated by PAS and other active consulting firms, as well as the miscellaneous handful of agencies that left more idiosyncratic records that shed light on that question. In analyzing these materials, we do find some variations across cities, particularly in the chronology of exactly when the most important changes unfolded, but, in general, we conclude that these far-flung cities converged on similar models for their call-for-service systems.

The dates announced in our title as the boundaries of our study are only approximate, since the historical development we hope to chronicle was continuous rather than abrupt, but they provide a rough sense of the timeline over which reactive policing took shape. Our end date of roughly 1970 was itself a conclusion of our research, since the call-for-service system that prevailed in most agencies by that time had all the major elements (centralization, specialization, and civilianization) and problems that characterize such systems today. We formally begin in 1880 (though the most significant developments emerged a half-century later, and most of our primary archival research focused on that later period) because that is the year Chicago fielded its influential telegraph system—arguably the first major effort to use advanced technology to make it easier for the public to summon a police officer. In fact, though, that moment is somewhat arbitrary since more primitive “technologies” such as whistles, neighborhood police stations, and police uniforms had already served a similar purpose. In any case, we will begin our story even earlier, drawing from the secondary historical literature to describe the context from which those new practices and technologies emerged.

The Emergence of New Communications Technologies

From the late nineteenth century onward, many American cities deployed new technologies that made officers more accessible to the public in emergencies, laying the foundations for the call-driven strategy that dominates policing today. The full impact of those technologies did not arise immediately from any single innovation but only after a long series of technological and organizational changes eventually coalesced into a coherent system governing police mobilization. It is useful, however, to set the stage for that story by describing the emergence of discrete technological elements that played a significant role in it.

In 1880, the Chicago Police Department piloted a system of public alarm stations on streetcorners throughout the city and private alarm boxes that businesses and individuals could purchase for $30. The public alarm boxes were octagonal versions of a twentieth-century telephone booth designed to hold a single person inside. A key—available to “respectable citizens”—was required to open the booth, which contained an iron box with a protruding lever that summoned the police when pulled (Rolfe Reference Rolfe1892). Delegates from other cities came to Chicago to learn about the new system, and city officials demonstrated how it worked to the attendees of the inaugural meeting of the National Police Association in Chicago in December 1880. Within a decade, Milwaukee, Detroit, Boston, Cincinnati, Brooklyn, and many other major cities had installed systems largely identical to Chicago’s (NYT 1881; Detroit Free Press 1884; Boston Daily Globe 1884; Mason Reference Mason1902).

As commercial telephone services spread in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, private telephones began to displace the alarm box as a major channel for individual members of the public to summon the police. Washington, DC, had already installed telephones in each precinct station and a few other locations by 1878, and New York City established an elaborate telephone switchboard to receive calls by 1893. Several other big cities employed several full-time telephone switchboard operators by the early twentieth century. At first, the police mostly used their telephones for internal communications because few members of the public had phones of their own before World War I (Fischer Reference Fischer1992: 22). As access to telephones proliferated, however, calls from the public increased; although fewer than one in ten households had a telephone in 1900, by the late 1920s nearly four in ten did, and a solid majority of households had their own telephone by 1950 (Fischer Reference Fischer1992: 22). At least by the 1930s, close observers of policing reported that the telephone had become the most common means for requesting help in most of the large and mid-sized cities they had studied (for example, IPA 1937: 101; Wilson Reference Wilson1942: 13).

By themselves, the telephone and the callbox could do little to alter the pattern of police work, since mobilizing officers to respond to callers’ requests remained cumbersome. Many cities kept small squads of reserve officers at the precinct stations so that they could spring into action immediately when someone came to the station or contacted them through a call box or telephone (Fosdick Reference Fosdick1920: 316; Leonard Reference Leonard1938: xiv, 16). Keeping a reserve force of idle officers was hardly a model of efficiency, so many departments tried to devise ways of summoning officers who were out on patrol to the scene of an emergency. Most cities had installed networks of call boxes where officers were supposed to check in every hour, and when they did, they could be dispatched to any trouble spot that had arisen since their last communication with the station (Leonard Reference Leonard1938: 6 ff.). That system proved too slow and haphazard to serve as an efficient emergency response system (Harrison Reference Harrison1934: 102). After the turn of the century, many cities equipped call boxes with lights or bells to alert passing officers to call the station for a message (for example, Monroe Reference Monroe1940: 256; Leonard Reference Leonard1938: 17–20), but that solution was imperfect. Chicago, for example, let its recall signals deteriorate by the early twentieth century (Citizens Police Committee 1931: 116). The caller’s reach and influence over police work in the field remained limited.

Police radio systems provided the definitive solution to this problem. Beginning in Detroit in 1928, police departments across the country installed workable mobile radios in police cars (Leonard Reference Leonard1938: 35). At first, the radios could only receive broadcasts from a central transmitter, so headquarters had no way of knowing whether the message had been received, but two-way radios soon became common. By 1940, essentially all cities that had a population of 100,000 or larger had installed radios in their police cars, as had most smaller towns (American Municipal Association 1940: 3). By 1949, 884 out of 904 cities with populations greater than 10,000 used radio cars (Byers Reference Byers1951: 1123). Responding to calls for service broadcast over the radio rapidly became a substantial part of police work (for example, Monroe Reference Monroe1940: 264–70), though organizational resistance to that imperative still constrained its impact in ways we will describe shortly.

Public Use of the New Communications Technologies

The calls that came in when police agencies finally assembled modern communications systems were very different from those that dominated the speeches, consultant reports, and advertisements that fueled them. In 1932, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department borrowed equipment from the Los Angeles Police Department to conduct a pilot study of radio cars (the city had installed its own radio system the year before), and its consultants recorded details about every one of the first 105 radio runs the Sheriff’s deputies made. Leaving aside roughly a dozen that were purely administrative (such as requests to meet another officer at the police station), nearly a quarter were “disturbances,” including several loud parties where the responding officers ordered the revelers to quiet down and a few rowdy groups of youths who were told to disperse. A dozen involved traffic problems, mostly minor accidents that involved no criminal wrongdoing. Ten calls reported suspicious people, including several that the police dismissed as unfounded (such as a group of men changing a tire and a man wearing a mask on his motorcycle). Five calls were about medical problems, four were about fires, three involved troublesome dogs, two involved drunks, and one was about a plane crash. All in all, 20 out of the 105 radio runs involved anything remotely like the crimes that police officials had emphasized when they described the value of the new communications systems, such as burglaries, assaults, thefts, and robberies. Just two of those incidents—both fights—resulted in an arrest. (In the disposition field of one of the burglary calls, the responding officer wrote “gone—no chance to get him,” perhaps feeling defensive that he had failed to capture an escaping criminal the way he was expected to.) Many of the ostensibly crime-related calls proved unfounded, including a theft call that turned out to be a property dispute between boys, an exaggerated call about a “big fight,” and a reported burglary where the culprit turned out to be a dog who had chewed up the curtains and rugs (Jones and Earl Reference Jones and Earl1933: 5–21).

The detailed records from the LA Sheriff’s experiment provide an uncommonly clear window into early call-for-service systems, but the experience they report was apparently common. As Essex County, New Jersey, considered a countywide police radio system four years later, several local officials objected that the new system would quickly be overwhelmed by “an increase in the amount of police business due to the use citizens will make of the service” (Woelfle Reference Woelfle1936: 9). Advocates of the new radio system tried to rebut this concern by conducting a survey of several large cities that already had experience with radio. One question asked: “From your experience can you advise generally if the use of Police Radio increases the number of police calls?” Every city responded that it had. Los Angeles reported that “an appreciable increase will be noticed immediately upon it becoming generally known that radio is being used, as many people will call on matters that they would otherwise ignore.” Saint Louis stated that “as people learn that police in radio-equipped cars will arrive within a very short time, in case of emergency, they come to depend upon the police more than any other organization, to stop petty arguments, to investigate minor cases, etc.” The officials who responded from other cities were enthusiastic about police radio, but they conceded that it altered the volume and character of calls from the public (Woelfle Reference Woelfle1936: 16–17). A few years later, Boston’s finance department worried about the sprawling duties of the city police in an era when municipal budgets were stretched thin, lamenting how the city’s new police radio system had contributed to the problem:

The report went on to list dozens of calls that the prowl cars had responded to: animal in tree, barking dog, bell ringing, boys on roof, boys bathing, boys in doorway, boys in schoolyard, boys chasing a chicken in street, broken window, drunk in doorway, garbage can thrown on front piazza, mailbox on fire, noisy radio, noisy party, noisy newsboy, person locked out of house, suspicious person, and so on. Such calls altered the character of police work, the report charged, as radio cars replaced foot patrol officers who had engaged in proactive patrols (Boston Finance Commission 1941).

Police Responses to Public Demands

Officers in the field were frustrated by some of the calls they had been assigned. In Milwaukee, a White woman told police that two Black men had been loitering near a grocery store and heard one of the men tell the other: “Well, it’s about time now.” When the Lieutenant told a group of officers to investigate, the ABF researcher riding along with them reported that they “did not conceal their annoyance over having been called back on a ‘chicken’ deal like this” (ABF 1956: 10027). Sheriff’s deputies in both Wisconsin and Kansas complained that many public requests involved conditions that police had little authority to regulate, such as a filthy and overcrowded trailer or a neighbor dumping garbage on his property (ABF 1956: 10034, 10536).

As patrol officers in the field responded to the deluge of calls, police leaders and policymakers mostly ignored the concerns they raised about the proper boundaries of the police role. After the Boston Finance Department’s report flagged its concern about nuisance calls, it said nothing else about them and made no recommendations to address them. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department said even less. In one short paragraph, its report briefly listed some of the most common types of calls that deputies had taken but did not comment on their character; it then devoted several pages of minute analysis to the precise number of miles the patrol cars traveled, how long it took them to respond, the FCC’s position on frequency allocation, and other technical details of the radio transmitters and receivers, ignoring the social and organizational implications of the radio system. The report continued to emphasize the possibility that rapid response would help capture escaping criminals, but it said nothing about the large number of calls about loud parties, obnoxious dogs, and unfounded suspicions (Jones and Earl Reference Jones and Earl1933). In Essex County, the advocates for regional radio read the results of their survey as good news: cities that had tried (in unstated ways) to quantify the increase in call volume gave estimates ranging from “a very slight increase” to 30 percent—far short of the doubling or tripling of calls that critics of the regional plan had predicted. That finding supported their view that the critics of police radio were being alarmist, in that the heightened call volume would not be enough to swamp the system. They interpreted the key problem as a technical concern about the radio system’s capacity, not a substantive concern about the proper scope of the police role (Woelfle Reference Woelfle1936). In these ways, police leaders and those who advised them mostly ignored the mundane reality of the calls people actually made to the police, and they continued to claim that the technology would help the police capture escaping criminals, even as evidence accumulated that the public overwhelmingly put it to other uses.

There were, however, exceptions. Writing in the middle of the great depression, at a time when municipal finances were in decline, Wichita police chief O.W. Wilson—who would go on to become the most influential police leader in the country—lamented the aloof attitude that the police generally took toward the public. Wilson believed that this attitude rested on “an ignorant misconception of the police function,” namely, “a failure to understand that the duty of the police is to serve” (Wilson Reference Wilson1940: 80). He insisted that police had to become more customer service oriented: “A reception equal in quality to that provided by the best retail establishment in town, whose existence depends on public goodwill, should be accorded the citizen who comes to the police for help” (ibid. 85). He particularly stressed that “the answering of a telephone or the offering of assistance to the citizen who calls at headquarters may seem to be a matter of small moment, but small matters bulk large in the aggregate. On them the reputation of the department is built” (ibid. 84; cf. Wilson Reference Wilson1950: 396). Several years later, the commander of Wichita’s communications division bluntly drew out the implications of this perspective for call-taking:

This perspective echoed across the country. An early article on police records and communications by Donald Stone—one of the founders of the PAS, the influential champion of mid-century police reform (Fogelson Reference Fogelson1977: 164, 175)—suggested that although the police might discount “a report by Mrs. Cheeseborough that the neighbors’ chickens have invaded her garden, or a complaint by Mr. Gump that the radio next door is making an outlandish nocturnal disturbance of the peace,” they did so at their peril:

Two decades later, when the ABF researchers visited Milwaukee, a police manager opined that “the success of the Milwaukee Police Department depends in very large degree in the trust the public places in the police department and the services extended by the police department to the public”; he went on to explain that the police could strengthen that trust by responding to trivial calls (ABF 1956: 10005).

These sentiments were not universal,Footnote ⁴ and they did not seem to have much impact on the way calls were actually handled in the early decades of the call-for-service system, for reasons we will explain shortly. Nevertheless, they expressed an important viewpoint. Although the new communications systems rarely fielded the kinds of calls their champions had envisioned, many police leaders and their advisors seemed inclined to defer to these unexpected public requests—not so much because they believed they really were proper police business but because they believed that treating them that way would shore up public support for the police.

This way of thinking ignored a crucial feature of the “service” the police provided, which often satisfies one person’s desires by frustrating another’s. When Donald Stone implored the police to respond to Mrs Cheeseborough’s calls to earn her support, he did not seem to consider the perspective of Mrs Cheeseborough’s neighbor, who may have wondered why the police were spending so much of their time bothering him and his chickens. By equating “the public” with “the caller,” this perspective effectively excluded a major segment of the public from consideration—namely, the people whom the “Mrs. Cheeseboroughs” of the world were calling about. That omission had significant implications related to race and class, since most people who had easy access to their own telephones during this era were whiter and wealthier than the average American (Fischer Reference Fischer1992: 90–3, 111, 117). Responding to their calls may well have been a useful way to build support among politically influential bond voters—the people the Wichita communications director described as “citizens and taxpayers, not criminals”—but it would make police priorities responsive to a skewed subset of the broader public (cf. Walsh Reference Walsh2018).

Gates and Gatekeepers

Some mechanism to deflect public demands had always accompanied new technologies that made it easier for members of the public to mobilize the police. When Chicago installed its telegraph alarm boxes in the late nineteenth century, it vigorously controlled access to them. Police made keys available only to “respectable citizens,” explaining that they “intend to be very careful in giving out keys”; when a keyholder used it to open an alarm station, the key remained stuck inside until an officer arrived. Since all keys were numbered, anyone who issued a false alarm would not only lose his key but could also be tracked down and fined $50 for the offense (Chicago Tribune 1880). This design expressed the department’s cautious attitude toward public demands for police service in material form, and it remained in place for decades, even after the telegraph boxes had been replaced with telephone call boxes. As other departments copied Chicago’s call box system, most of them restricted access to the boxes to people whom they deemed “respectable,” “responsible,” or “discreet” (for example, NYT 1881; Boston Daily Globe 1884; Leonard Reference Leonard1938: Chapter 1). After the turn of the century, a few began to leave the boxes unlocked or installed a “citizen’s call button” on the outside so that anyone could contact the police station, but many departments restricted access to the boxes until the 1940s or 1950s (Gourley and Bristow Reference Gourley and Bristow1961: 181; ICMA 1954: 392). Milwaukee, for example, did not unlock its call boxes to the general public until the late 1940s, and only then because of a telephone operator’s strike that temporarily hampered private telephone usage (ABF 1956: 10,009).

The locks and vetting that had once controlled access to the call boxes and their keys eventually became less significant obstacles to public access, as the private telephone gradually replaced the police call box as the main channel for contacting the police. But that new channel did not yet give callers unfiltered access to a police response, for the human gatekeepers who manned the telephone switchboards replaced the physical barriers that had restricted access to the call boxes. Municipal documents, training materials, and police management literature suggested that dispatchers screened out less serious calls (for example, Woelfle Reference Woelfle1936: 16–7), and the leading text on police communications suggested that calls about matters of “minor importance” could be handed over to the precinct station where officers could decide whether any response was warranted; central dispatch would only send a car in true emergencies (Leonard Reference Leonard1938: 57).

The ethnographic material compiled by the American Bar Foundation in three states from 1956 to 1957 provides more concrete evidence of gatekeeping by mid-century telephone operators and dispatchers. The most detailed information came from Detroit, where researchers observed all the activity undertaken by a precinct desk Lieutenant during a two-hour period (including the calls he answered while managing the station) and left a tape recorder on another desk Lieutenant’s desk for an hour on a different day. The desk Lieutenants refused to send a car in response to half of the calls for service documented during these two periods. In one, a woman reported that two men were arguing in her home; the desk Lieutenant asked whether the men had knives, and when she answered that they did not, he explained that “the police were not needed, that the squads were busy, and that, if the men commenced to fight, the complainant should call again.” In another, a woman called in distress, indicating that “she was going to kill her husband” and demanded that the police come to remove him from their home; the desk Lieutenant refused to send a car on the grounds that the husband “had a right to live in his own home.” In still another, a man indicated that he had been “held up,” but the Lieutenant was suspicious that the caller was drunk, so he prolonged the conversation; he eventually concluded that the man was definitely drunk, so he asked him to come into the station to report the holdup the next day (ABF 1956: 11042, 11100). Dispatchers would send a police officer to respond to calls like these today.Footnote ⁵ At the end of their months-long study of Detroit, ABF researchers concluded that many calls for police service “are dismissed by the officer receiving the information as not being worthy of police attention” (ABF 1956: 11105). Less busy departments probably did not filter calls as aggressively as Detroit, as some told researchers that they would readily respond to minor complaints like “barking dogs” (though the researchers never actually observed such calls during their ridealongs) (ABF 1956: 11158). Nevertheless, some call-takers and dispatchers in rural and suburban jurisdictions did indicate they exercised discretion in deciding whether to send an officer (for example, ABF 1956: 10536, 11158).

As the examples observed by the ABF researchers in Detroit indicate, some of this gatekeeping was objectionable. The Detroit desk Lieutenants repeatedly rebuffed abused wives because they felt their plight was a private matter, ignored intoxicated victims, and seemed reluctant to take complaints from sex workers seriously. The point is not that the people who answered calls and dispatched police cars in this era were model gatekeepers but simply that they actively meditated between public requests and police response.

The Organizational Context of Gatekeeping

Police agencies did little to standardize or shape this gatekeeping work, even though they implicitly acknowledged its importance. Training materials told call-takers they should only send a police car to legitimate police calls. One handbook from 1938 explained that officers taking calls from the public needed to know “when and in what cases to advise, direct, or reroute citizen calls” but did not articulate any criteria they could use to do that (Adams Reference Adams1938: 72). Training bulletins and communications manuals did not elaborate either. “The officer to whom the call is directed is fully protected in accepting the Communications Division’s conclusion that the facts justify emergency action,” an LAPD bulletin from the 1940s explained. “He must have sufficient information to justify his conclusion that a situation exists which requires immediate police attention for the protection of persons or property” (original emphasis). The bulletin did not, however, provide any further guidance about what this standard implied in practice (Parker Reference Parker1949). Similarly, the communications manual for the Michigan State Police indicated that some complaints should not receive a police response, but it assumed that a distinction could be drawn intuitively by people with a policing background: “One general rule should be emphasized. Do not request radio to put out a broadcast for some other officers to make an investigation you would not make yourself” (Olander Reference Olander1941: 11). Despite pages and pages of minute guidance about how to operate the dispatch system and formulate succinct messages suitable for the radio, these documents never articulated substantive principles or adduced examples to indicate what kinds of calls merited a police response.

Police leaders found it difficult to articulate a general principle that could adequately distinguish calls that warranted a police response from those that did not. During a 1937 IACP meeting, one participant asked for clarification about when a call qualified as an “emergency” that should be broadcast over the police radio:

Other than the tautology that police radio should not broadcast “unnecessary or superfluous” information or the obvious ban on “private conversation between officers,” Lieutenant Jett provided no way of distinguishing incidents that merited radio dispatch from those that did not.

Embedded Gatekeepers

The lack of meaningful guidance and constraints left telephone operators and dispatchers largely on their own as they decided how to respond to the deluge of calls that increasingly flowed in from the public. They made those decisions in a way that reflected the experiences, expectations, and relationships associated with their role, which was typically not the role of a communications specialist but of a police official with other duties and preoccupations who also happened to answer the phone or dispatch cars over the radio.

Although the organizational location of the call-taking and dispatching tasks remained in flux from the 1930s through to the 1960s, many departments used an arrangement similar to the one just described in Detroit, where a precinct official (typically a desk Lieutenant or Sergeant) answered many routine calls and decided whether to send a car to respond to them. They carried out those tasks as one component of a broader role. The desk Sergeant might be discussing whether to detain an alleged thief with the detectives who had arrested him overnight, and those deliberations might be interrupted by a phone call from a disgruntled husband who said his wife had slapped him and then left for the bar; the sergeant might then contact the turnkey at police headquarters to get a full report on all the inmates currently being detained (for example, ABF 1956: 11,042, 11,105). As described below, this arrangement contrasts sharply with the more specialized call-taking function that eventually took root. In the early years of the call-for-service system, the gatekeeping task was embedded in a broader policing role.

Whether they worked in the precincts or a centralized communications division, the early gatekeepers were usually sworn officers. The leading text on the topic, V.A. Leonard’s Police Communications, maintained that telephone operators should have “a good record of two years on the force, or the time spent on police duty is sufficient to have given him a fair knowledge of the department’s operating procedure”; it went on to highlight one prominent chief who assigned his most promising officers to these positions (Leonard Reference Leonard1938: 63–4).Footnote ⁶ Even the Boston Finance Committee, searching intently for ways to cut costs in the city’s police department in 1941, conceded that sworn officers belonged in the dispatch center (Boston Finance Committee 1941: 68–69). A few cities did employ civilian call-takers in the 1930s (see, for example, Leonard Reference Leonard1938: 66), but that arrangement seemed to be the exception rather than the rule, and dispatchers were almost exclusively sworn officers. In the cities studied by the ABF in the mid-1950s, every agency still employed sworn officers as dispatchers, and most used sworn officers as call-takers.

The background of these early dispatchers and call-takers was important because it meant that they brought a distinctive set of assumptions, expertise, and experiences to their work. As he fielded calls, a desk Sergeant could rely on his own knowledge as a police officer of the legal authority and other tools that the responding officer would be able to draw from to handle the caller’s problem; he might also compare the seriousness of that problem with the rest of the precinct’s workload. For example, one fieldnote recorded in Detroit’s 13th precinct reported that:

Even when the people who took calls and dispatched officers worked for a central communications division, they were usually sworn officers who performed those tasks in light of their background knowledge and commitments as police officers.

The Centralization of Police Communications

In the early twentieth century, police precincts were a locus of authority in many American police departments, the place where priorities and strategies were debated and formulated under the close supervision of neighborhood politicians. A main thrust of twentieth-century police reform aimed to relocate that authority to police headquarters, in part to combat the influence that ward leaders had on the police via the precinct leadership (Reiss Reference Reiss1992: 52, 58–59; Fogelson Reference Fogelson1977: 91, 159, 176–77).

That effort to centralize police command authority intersected with the rise of police communications technologies in a way that significantly shaped both projects. Since precincts had been justified as places where city residents could access their police—reserve officers often remained at the station to be mobilized as needed, and patrol officers periodically checked in there for instructions—it was easy to argue that the new police communications system made them obsolete. Now every car in the field was part of a reserve force available for emergencies, and no one needed to walk down to the local precinct station to ask for help; they could just call. Dozens of cities began to shutter precincts once two-way radio became widely available (for example, PAS 1942: 14; Jones and Earl Reference Jones and Earl1933: 40–41; Leonard Reference Leonard1938: 4–16; Bureau of Municipal Research 1943: 115; Citizens Research 1942: 49; Citizens Police Committee 1931: 95–96).

Initially, precinct stations in many cities neutralized the threat that communications technologies posed to their authority by taking charge of telephone dispatch themselves (as described earlier). Over time, however, reformers urged police departments to make headquarters the sole point of public access: precinct stations should no longer be listed in the phone book but be replaced by an easily remembered departmentwide number such as “POLICE 1313” (for example, Providence Govt. Research Bureau 1933: 39; ICMA 1954: 382; Leonard Reference Leonard1938: 9, 14, 313; PAS 1946: 56). Not only would that arrangement make the police more accessible to frantic callers, they argued, it would also suit the technological requirements of the new systems (Leonard Reference Leonard1938: 314; cf. Winner Reference Winner1977: 181–85). Radio transmitters were expensive and (initially) complicated devices that had to be operated at headquarters, and the telephone was best operated in the same location.

Even in cities that centralized call-taking, the precincts sometimes retained control over key aspects of dispatching. In mid-century Milwaukee and Detroit, for example, the central communications division took all incoming calls but then transferred most of them to the district stations to decide whether to dispatch a car (ABF 1958: II, 23–4; V, 16). Similarly, in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1950, a telephone operator at police headquarters answered all emergency calls initially and then contacted the appropriate precinct to decide what kind of response, if any, was warranted. Only after that consultation did the telephone operator contact the dispatch sergeant to issue the order over the radio (PAS 1952: 54).

Once again, reformers sought to wrest control over this crucial decision from the precincts. In Worcester, a PAS report commissioned by the city insisted that precinct commanders should have no role in dispatching (PAS 1952: 61). PAS never gave much of a rationale for this shift, but the implications were clear: now both the call-taking function and the dispatching function were relocated from precincts to headquarters. That arrangement soon became conventional wisdom throughout the field. O.W. Wilson, who had a longstanding relationship with PAS and was listed as the sole provider of “consulting assistance” on the Worcester report, recommended the centralization of call-taking and dispatching in his landmark textbook Police Administration, as well as his earlier textbook on police records published by PAS. In both books, he argued that centralized dispatch would foster “accurate crime accounting” by limiting the opportunities for precinct staff to buff their image by failing to record all calls about crime (Wilson Reference Wilson1950: 325; Wilson Reference Wilson1942: 13). For him, the decision about the organizational location of dispatching depended more on its secondary effects on police records than its direct effect on the kinds of calls police would respond to.

Tension between Precincts and Headquarters

The centralization of dispatch sparked significant tensions between headquarters and the precincts, for it seemed to usurp the Sergeant’s authority to direct his patrol officers. Who was this disembodied voice over the radio to tell his officers where to go and demand a report of what they did? What was an officer to think when he had to interrupt the patrol assignment that his Sergeant had given him—checking door locks, watching known pickpockets, inspecting pawn shops, and so on—because the dispatcher wanted him to investigate the chickens in Mrs Cheeseborough’s garden? Those tensions escalated as central communications staff pushed officers to deemphasize their crime prevention work to make them more accessible to dispatchers (for example, ABF 1956: 10,052, 11,234), and they continued to erupt for decades (Rubinstein Reference Rubinstein1973: 80, 114; Schwartz et al. Reference Schwartz, Vaughn, Waller and Wholey1975: 13–14; Moskos Reference Moskos2008: Chapter 5).

Wilson’s long-time mentor, August Vollmer, who had preceded him as the most influential police leader in America, raised this problem in a report for the Portland Police Bureau in the 1940s. That agency had already established a system that routed all calls to the main switchboard, where a radio dispatcher decided whether to send an officer and what information to provide. Vollmer complained that this arrangement usurped the authority of the precinct supervisors who normally oversaw patrol officers, leaving them with no control over their officers’ assignments and only as much information about their work as they could learn by monitoring the short radio broadcasts. Instead, Vollmer argued, phone calls should be routed to the precinct desk commander, who would “ascertain the exact nature of the case, confer with the station commander as necessary and instruct the radio dispatcher regarding patrol car assignments”—precisely the arrangement that PAS would soon criticize in Worcester. By retaining control over dispatching decisions, Vollmer insisted, precinct leadership could rely on their knowledge of current priorities and conditions in the area to ensure that emergency response complemented the precinct’s other work and thereby “see that police effort is properly expended” (Vollmer Reference Vollmer1947: 166–70).

Wilson and other advocates of centralized dispatching acknowledged the problem in principle. Influenced by mid-century theories of scientific management, Wilson conceded that police departments had to ensure unity of command. If multiple people could command the same officer, “the orders are not likely to be harmonious, and conflicting orders confuse subordinates and prevent coordination of the efforts of the group.” The apparent tension between the dispatcher’s and the Sergeant’s orders seemed to be a prime example of this concern (Wilson Reference Wilson1950: 38–39, 52; cf Wilson Reference Wilson1942: 13; ICMA 1954: 390).

Wilson tried to neutralize this concern by reconceptualizing the nature of the dispatcher’s role. He insisted that the tension that critics like Vollmer raised was more apparent than real; dispatchers did not really exercise authority when they decided to dispatch a patrol car. To make that case, he distinguished two types of authority to issue commands: the familiar “line” variety of command authority, in which a manager has the power to make independent judgments about what to tell his subordinates to do and what he called “staff command,” in which a person who lacks any authority of their own issues orders on behalf of someone else—a person like the chief’s secretary, “who says, in effect, ‘the chief says that you shall do so and so’” (Wilson Reference Wilson1950: 50). Radio dispatchers were a prime example of staff command (indeed they were Wilson’s only example; he apparently invented the category to address the problem they posed) (ibid. 50–52). In Wilson’s view, they served as a type of clerical staff to the police commanders who had established the dispatch policy they were expected to implement:

Wilson had already articulated key elements of this vision in his more specialized 1942 textbook, Police Records (Wilson Reference Wilson1942: 13–14). If precinct leadership believed that dispatchers were sidetracking their officers, he implied, their recourse lay in the “department regulations” that governed dispatchers’ decisions: “Departmental regulations governing these matters, drafted with the participation of the heads of the operating divisions, will safeguard their interests,” he explained to the frustrated precinct leaders (Wilson Reference Wilson1942: 13–14).

In fact, however, “departmental regulations governing these matters” were thin to nonexistent, as described earlier. Wilson’s argument appealed to a set of organizational rules governing dispatch choices that simply did not exist. (As Lieutenant Jett’s sputtering response to questions about how to define an “emergency” worthy of police response at the IACP conference a few years earlier had suggested, it wasn’t clear that such rules could be formulated.) Wilson briefly acknowledged the existence of discretion, conceding that some cases dispatchers had to handle “are not covered by regulations,” but he thought those cases were rare – limited to “unusual or emergency situations” that could usually be referred to the commanding officer on duty (Wilson Reference Wilson1950: 50–51).

Despite the manifest flaws of Wilson’s account, it provided reformers with a principled response to concerns like Vollmer’s—a rationale for ignoring the authority that dispatchers and call-takers actually exercised that was grounded in the fiction that their decisions were regulated by departmental policies. Wilson and his PAS colleagues repeatedly invoked that fiction when they recommended the centralization of dispatching in several cities, presumably to rebut the kind of objection that Vollmer had raised in Portland. For example, in a PAS report to the city of Hartford, Wilson wrote that “the dispatchers are not personally in command of patrolmen, traffic officers, and detectives on the street but serve only as transmitting agents for orders emanating from the division commanders. General rules and policies should be drafted by the Chief of Police and superior officers to guide the dispatcher in making general decisions” (PAS 1942: 120). His model seemed to become conventional wisdom in the field. For example, the ICMA’s Municipal Police Administration similarly separated call-taking and dispatch from patrol operations as a distinct “staff” unit (ICMA 1954: 387–88, see Gay, Schell, and Shack Reference Gay, Schell and Schack1977: 81–82), and communications manuals for local police departments across the country adopted Wilson’s language (for example, the City of Huntington 1965: 2).

This conceptualization of the dispatcher’s role, which denied that it involved any exercise of discretion, was a significant step in establishing the modern call-for-service system. Along with the organizational relocation of the dispatch function from the precincts to headquarters, it insulated the call-for-service system from other sources of authority that had previously intruded into it, forbidding officers and their immediate supervisors from countermanding orders from the dispatcher (for example, City of Huntington 1965: 3). The caller now had a direct channel to the police officer on the beat, mediated only by centralized communications staff who were viewed as something akin to secretaries taking phone messages for their intended recipients.

Civilianization

As Wilson reconceptualized communications work as a type of clerical work, more and more agencies handed it over to civilians—particularly female civilians. That shift both reflected and advanced the emerging consensus that call-taking and dispatching were ministerial functions. Discretion, to put it bluntly, was something that sworn male officers exercised; only a ministerial role was suitable for civilian “girls.”

As discussed above, the earliest communications systems had usually been staffed by sworn officers, but soon, these officers were replaced by civilians, often women. Some police departments civilianized their own departmental call centers, while some did not civilianize until they established or joined a regional call center that received calls from many police jurisdictions (and often fire and EMS calls). Regardless of how or when it occurred, this transition was frequently rocky, and the tensions that erupted indicated what was at stake (for example, Citizens Research 1942: 60; National Service to Regional Councils 1970: 7; Korczynski Reference Korczynski1978; Scott Reference Scott1981: 11). In the mid-1950s, for example, the police chief of West Allis, Wisconsin, introduced civilian women as call-takers and dispatchers, explaining that he was “quite proud of the idea of using women radio operators” because it “refines” the culture of the communications center. The chief conceded, however, that the introduction of civilians had created “a little resentment on the part of the men because they don’t think a woman capable of performing the function.” To alleviate those concerns, the department restricted the women’s authority significantly, instructing them to immediately turn all calls for police service over to the desk Sergeant on duty, who would decide how to respond to the call and then tell the dispatcher what message, if any, to broadcast over the radio. An ABF researcher reported that “these instructions are designed to prevent anyone other than a police officer from making what, essentially, is a police decision. It is being strictly enforced in view of the fact that the department is now in the process of shifting over to civilian employees (women) as radio operators” (ABF 1956: 10095, 10097, 10099, 10111, 10113). This temporary expedient of subjecting civilian dispatchers to the Sergeant’s authority apparently alleviated resistance to civilianization in West Allis for the time being, but the pressure for centralization eventually eliminated such arrangements.

Since sworn personnel had so little faith in the knowledge and competence that civilians brought to police work, the shift to civilians had a significant impact on the perception and reality of communications work. As several studies beginning in the 1970s indicated, civilian communications staff had low status in the department, and patrol officers and managers often doubted that they could exercise judgment responsibly (Rubinstein 1971; Schwartz et al. Reference Schwartz, Vaughn, Waller and Wholey1975; Korczynski Reference Korczynski1978; cf. Orosco and Gaub Reference Orosco and Gaub2023); their job was to pass citizen calls on to police officers to let them sort things out, not to play a gatekeeping role for which they were unqualified. In that way, civilianization seems to have further eroded whatever discretion call-takers and dispatchers still exercised. For example, when the San Francisco police department civilianized its communications center in 1972, the number of calls forwarded to the police immediately rose, while the rate at which call-takers resolved calls on their own sharply fell (Maxfield Reference Maxfield1979: 119–21).

In short, with a loss of prestige to the job title and fewer trained policemen at the switchboard, police officials increasingly conceived of the phone operator function to be clerical—a matter of passing raw information from callers to police. When Eric Scott conducted his important study of call-takers and dispatchers in three cities during the 1970s, he reported that “their job is frequently conceptualized by police planners and managers as essentially clerical in nature” (Scott Reference Scott1981: 11). Wilson’s argument about the clerical nature of communications work did not bring this transformation about, but the transformation made his argument more plausible.

By the 1970s, the discretionary gatekeeping that dispatchers had conducted during the first years of police radio systems had declined substantially. When Jonathan Rubinstein conducted his intensive participant-observation study of the Philadelphia police department from 1969 to 1971, he paid close attention to the communications systems. “The phone man and the dispatcher are not allowed to decide whether a car should be dispatched,” Rubinstein wrote (1973: 75–76). Other scholars echoed that conclusion (for example, Scott Reference Scott1981: 10). More recent studies document a similar norm cautious of discretionary gatekeeping in centralized call centers (though individual call-takers sometimes devise creative gatekeeping strategies to evade these norms) (Gillooly Reference Gillooly2020b; Lum et al. Reference Lum, Koper, Stoltz, Goodier, Johnson, Prince and Wu2020). To be sure, call-takers and dispatchers clearly do screen out some calls even today, and members of marginalized communities have insisted that the 911 system often fails to take their concerns seriously (though usually the charge is not that the call-takers deflect their requests entirely but that the police take too long to respond or fail to take their concerns seriously once they arrive) (for example, Carr, Napolitano, and Keating Reference Carr, Napolitano and Keating2007; Brunson and Gau, Reference Brunson and Gau2015). To a significant degree, however, the modern call-for-service system does little to filter the wide-ranging demands that callers make for some kind of police response.