Police Effectiveness in Handling Disturbance Calls

This study examined the social, psychological, and temporal demensions of “disturbance calls” and, in addition, provided a pre-post evaluation of the effects of crisis intervention training upon 64 El Monte, California patrol officers. It was found that trained officers tended to rate their handling of cases more positively than did untrained officers; furthermore, telephone follow-ups revealed that citizens gave more favorable evaluations of the service provided by trained officers compared to untrained officers. Training yeilded a slight, temporary suppression of the rate of return calls to the same address, however, the rate of return calls occurring two weeks after the initial contact was not significantly lower than the rate prior to training.