Abstract
I evaluate the impact of female police officers during civilian interactions. Using administrative data from the Dallas Police Department and an instrumental variables strategy that exploits quasi-random variation in female officer availability, I find that patrol cars with at least one female officer are 30.5 percentage points more likely to file an incident report and 2.3 percentage points less likely to make an arrest, with the foregone arrests concentrated among low-level offenses. In the twelve months after the initial call, households assigned a female officer are 21 percent less likely to place another 911 call of the same type. Non-emergency reporting does not change, suggesting that the decline reflects fewer underlying incidents rather than reduced reporting. These findings suggest that female officers shift the response toward documentation and away from discretionary low-level arrests at no greater cost to the department, and that their presence reduces households’ subsequent demand for emergency response.
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Citation
Longmuir, Ryan. 2026. “Fewer Arrests, Fewer Calls: Female Officers and the Production of Public Safety.” Working Paper.