A preliminary investigation of the use of racial/ethnic categories in emergency telephone calls in the United States

ABSTRACT

This paper uses conversation analysis to investigate how participants in emergency telephone calls in the United States use racial/ethnic categories to describe persons of interest such as suspects, victims, or persons needing assistance. It problematizes the use of racial/ethnic categories in these calls by first analyzing an instance of a caller’s racial profiling (in which racial categories are used to justify the call). This instance of racial profiling is then compared with 15 routine emergency service calls to reveal how callers and call takers routinely introduced racial/ethnic categories. I describe how both deviant and routine uses of these categories could lead to racial profiling and/or displace information that might be more effective in creating useful descriptions of persons of interest. The conclusion addresses ideas for further research and practical implications for emergency telephone call takers and those working to transform the way race is tied to policing in the United States.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• ethnicity
• racial profiling
• emergency telephone calls
• conversation analysis

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Bentley University for a sabbatical which supported the work for this project. Thanks also to the reviewers for their extremely helpful suggestions for improving the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Angela Cora Garcia

Angela Cora Garcia is a professor in the Department of Natural and Applied Sciences at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Her main areas of research are conversation analytic studies of mediation sessions, emergency phone calls to the police, air traffic communications, and political speeches and interviews. She is the author of a textbook on conversation analysis, An Introduction to Interaction: Understanding Talk in Formal and Informal Settings (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2013), and a conversation analytic study of mediation, How Mediation Works: Resolving Conflict through Talk (Cambridge University Press, 2019).