The United States has a long history of police violence against unarmed Black individuals. New research shows that such incidents have a lasting, nationwide impact on the relationship between communities and law enforcement.

In a paper in the American Economic Review: Insights, authors Desmond Ang, Panka Bencsik, Jesse Bruhn, and Ellora Derenoncourt uncovered a substantial decline in crime reporting across US cities in the wake of George Floyd's murder by Minneapolis police. The finding suggests that high-profile acts of police violence erode community engagement with law enforcement.

The authors based their conclusions on 911 call data from US police departments and gunshot data from acoustic gunshot detection technology—a network of microphones installed in urban neighborhoods that automatically detect and locate gunfire. By combining these two datasets, the researchers created a call-to-shot ratio to measure a community’s willingness to engage with police.

Figure 3 from the authors’ paper shows the call-to-shot data before and after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.

Figure 3 from Ang et al. (2025)

The chart depicts 911 calls and gunshots in 2020 across 13 major US cities, including Baltimore, New York, Minneapolis, and San Francisco. The vertical dashed grey line represents the week the COVID-19 national emergency was declared. The vertical solid red line indicates the week of George Floyd’s death. The vertical dashed green line marks the end of rioting and Black Lives Matter protests. 

Panel A displays the call-to-shot ratio, which is the number of 911 calls per detected gunshot. Before Floyd's death, communities averaged 250 to 300 calls per gunshot. After his murder, this plummeted by more than 50 percent, dropping to around 125 calls per shot and remaining depressed through December 2020.

Panel B breaks down the components driving this change. The red line shows that gunshots more than doubled after Floyd's death and remained persistently high. The blue line shows that 911 calls actually decreased by about 25 percent, despite the surge in gunfire. This combination—more gunshots but fewer calls—created the dramatic drop in the call-to-shot ratio.

The findings suggest that police violence erodes community trust, which reduces crime reporting, potentially making it harder for police to solve crimes and protect communities. Understanding these dynamics may be crucial as communities continue to grapple with the question of how to ensure public safety and rebuild trust in the wake of high-profile incidents of police violence.