“Who You Gonna Call?” The Politics of Atlanta’s Policing Alternatives and Diversion Initiative Public

Abstract

Americans task the police with many roles and responsibilities. One of them is responding to order-maintenance issues, which tend to result from low-level, even non-criminal offenses. Police often respond in those situations by arresting, jaliing, and sometimes harming people. Some cities however are experimenting with allowing police and non-police responders to divert some people from arrest and jail. Atlanta is one of them. This thesis studies the case of the Policing Alternatives and Diversion (PAD) Initiative in the city of Atlanta. Central to the initiative is the use of non-police responders to resolve some order-maintenance and non-criminal offenses in the city through diversion from arrest and jail. PAD is a result of community activism, interest group mobilization, transformed social constructions, and noncongruent policymaking. Drawing from a mix of interviews with PAD staff, archival research, participant-observation of PAD services and court proceedings, and multivariate analysis of court records, this thesis provides evidence that PAD’s diversion services reduce one’s likelihood of future arrest or rearrest. Specifically, I find that PAD participants are 14.8% less likely to be arrested in the six months after diversion and 24.2% in the twelve months after diversion compared to similar, non-PAD participants. Ultimately, this thesis argues that a shift from the current model of policing for order-maintenance can allow municipalities to arrest and jail less, thereby helping broader efforts to reduce mass incarceration.

Table of Contents

Introduction          

Literature Review          

Policing: Functions, Footprint, and Failures         Public Demand for Policing Alternatives         Diversion from Policing: Municipal Models from Across the USA        

Atlanta’s Policing Alternatives and Diversion Initiative                                                         

Criminalizing “Disorder” in the “City Too Busy to Hate”         The Political of Origins of PAD        

Implementation of PAD        

Diversion         Case Management  Municipal Doubts About Diversion        

Assessing PAD as a "Public-Private Partnership”        

Data                     Treatment Group Control Group Methods         Propensity score matching  Balancing test Data Limitations Results         Results of Pre-Matching Analysis Results of Post-Matching Analysis

Discussion of Empirical Results        

Conclusion        

Appendix        

Reference

About this Honors Thesis

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School	Emory College
Department	Political Science
Degree	B.A.
Submission	Honors Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Economics, General Urban and Regional Planning Political Science, General
Mot-clé	Diversion Atlanta Police Incarceration Policing alternatives Policing
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Michael Leo Owens, Emory University
Committee Members	Adam Glynn, Emory University Stephen O'Connell, Emory University David McMillon, Emory University

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