The study makes for a grim chronicle. On October 23, 2004, Jude and a black male friend arrived at a private party in a white middle-class neighborhood as guests of two white women college students. Shortly after arriving, the four headed to their vehicle, but it was soon surrounded by at least 10 men. 
 
 The men accused Jude and his friend of stealing Andrew Spengler’s police badge, and all four were pulled from their truck. Jude’s male friend had “his face slit with a knife” and escaped, according to the authors. Jude suffered blows to his face and torso; his arms were pinned behind his back; he was kicked in the head; an officer stomped on his face “until he heard bones breaking;” he was picked up and kicked in the groin so hard “his feet left the ground;” he had a pen inserted deep into his ear canals; his fingers were “bent back” until “they snapped;” before finally being left naked from the waist down on the sidewalk in a pool of his own blood. 
 
 Jude’s story would not become public until months later when the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a report on the incident on February 6, 2005, and recounted the police cover-up that had followed. Black residents protested almost immediately, demanding action from the district attorney. A month later, nine officers were dismissed. Spengler and two others were tried and acquitted by an all-white jury. Protests ensued again. A federal investigation led to the conviction of seven of the officers involved. 
 
 “Once the story of Frank Jude’s beating appeared in the press, Milwaukee residents, especially people in black neighborhoods, were less likely to call the police, including to report violent crime,” David Kirk, one of the authors of the report, said in a statement. “This means that publicized cases of police violence can have a communitywide impact on crime reporting that transcends individual encounters.” 
 
 A total of 22,200 fewer calls were made to 911 during the year following Jude’s beating, according to the researchers, with over half of that loss (56 percent) happening in black neighborhoods. The authors of the study see the significant decline as worrisome given how heavily police work depends on resident-initiated interactions, such as calling the emergency line. “Police work of every kind relies on citizen participation, especially reports of law breaking … If police misconduct lowers crime reporting throughout black communities, it directly threatens public safety within those communities, many of which already have high levels of crime,” the authors concluded in the article. 
 
 To test their theory that police brutality makes black Americans less likely to contact police, the authors also analyzed the impact of other highly publicized incidents of violence against black men by law enforcement, including two that happened outside of Milwaukee. They looked at the killing of Sean Bell in Queens, New York in 2006, the assault of Danyall Simpson in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 2007, and the killing of Oscar Grant in Oakland, California in 2009. Of these three, only the latter did not trigger a drop in calls to 911. The data again led to the conclusion that “other local and national cases of police violence against unarmed black men also had an impact on crime reporting in Milwaukee.” ||||| Skip Ad Ad Loading... x Embed x Share Residents in predominantly black neighborhoods in Milwaukee were far less likely to call 911 for months after the Frank Jude Jr. beating, a new study has found. 
 
 Harvard study finds 911 calls dropped by 20% after beating, much of it in black neighborhoods 
 
 Frank Jude Jr. is shown in the hospital after he was beaten by off-duty Milwaukee police officers in October 2004. After the story of this beating and this photo became public, there was a sharp drop in 911 calls placed from predominantly black neighborhoods, a new study found. (Photo: Family photo) Story Highlights Frank Jude Jr. was beaten by off-duty Milwaukee police officers; three received long prison terms. 
 
 A new study finds calls to 911 from black neighborhoods dropped sharply after the beating became public. 
 
 Homicides jumped up during the time 911 calls were done and study suggests a connection. 
 
 911 calls dropped again after a different police beating two years after the Jude incident. 
 
 The beating of Frank Jude Jr. 12 years ago by off-duty Milwaukee police officers rocked the city, leading to the largest number of firings in department history, federal convictions of seven officers and a series of reforms. 
 
 A new study reveals another unseen but far-reaching impact: Residents in predominantly black neighborhoods in Milwaukee were far less likely to call 911 for months after the beating. 
 
 That dropoff in 911 calls suggests the incident eroded trust and sharply damaged the relationship between the police and neighborhoods that often count on them the most, according to the study. 
 
 Controlling for crime and other factors, researchers found that 911 calls dropped by approximately 22,000 citywide over the following year, with the effect much higher in black neighborhoods, according to a first-of-its-kind study done by faculty from Harvard, Yale and Oxford universities. It was published Thursday in the American Sociological Review. 
 
 As 911 calls dropped, the city experienced a surge in homicides later in 2005, leading the authors to suggest the lack of reporting of crimes by citizens may have contributed to the spike in killings. 
 
 The researchers found another drop in 911 calls in predominantly black neighborhoods after the beating of Danyall Simpson by a Milwaukee police officer. And they also found evidence that an incident of police violence in another city might have contributed to a drop in 911 calls in Milwaukee. 
 
 The findings come at a time when high-profile cases of police-involved shootings contribute to unrest across the nation. Meanwhile, homicide figures have spiked in some cities, including Milwaukee. 
 
 The Jude beating was first reported in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation that described the extent of Jude's injuries and spotlighted the failure by police and state prosecutors to thoroughly investigate what would later be described as the torture of Jude by the officers outside an off-duty police party in Bay View in October 2004. 
 
 ORIGINAL COVERAGE: Police suspected in Frank Jude's beating | Prosecutors haven’t queried key witness in Frank Jude case | 100 protest progress of police beating case | Wall of silence not breaking in Jude case 
 
 The study's lead author, Matthew Desmond, associate social sciences professor at Harvard University, said the research shows that 911 calls started dropping right after the Journal Sentinel investigation was published and stayed down over the following year. 
 
 "Something like the Frank Jude case tears the fabric apart so deeply and de-legitimizes the criminal justice system in the eyes of the African-American community that they stop relying on it in significant numbers," Desmond told the Journal Sentinel in an interview. 
 
 Desmond, who recently published a book that examined the unseen effects of evictions on families and communities, did the study with Andrew Papachristos, associate professor of sociology at Yale University whose research focuses on gun violence, street gangs, social networks and neighborhoods; and David Kirk, associate sociology professor at the University of Oxford in England. 
 
 The study examined more than 1 million 911 calls in Milwaukee between 2004 and 2010. To do the statistical analysis, the authors controlled for crime rates in different neighborhoods, weather and other factors. They also removed calls unrelated to crime including traffic, fires and medical emergencies. 
 
 The study found 911 calls fell by 20% in the city over that year and the drop was markedly larger in black neighborhoods. Over half of the drop in calls — 56% — happened in predominantly black neighborhoods, which account for 31% of all neighborhoods. Desmond said he was shocked when he first saw the size of the drop. 
 
 "That is a huge effect and it symbolizes that these are not isolated incidents because they don’t have isolated effects, they have community-wide effects and those effects can actually make the city less safe by driving down crime reporting and thwarting public safety efforts," he said. 
 
 Skip Ad Ad Loading... x Embed x Share Columnist Dan Bice and Opinion Columnist James Causey discuss a new study about a decrease in 911 calls after the beating of Frank Jude Jr. 12 years ago. 
 
 The new findings run counter to a theory that has been advanced to explain the recent spike in homicides in some cities — that the increase is fueled by police becoming timid which emboldens criminals. Coined the "Ferguson Effect" in reference to unrest after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the theory holds officers have become passive out of fear they will be investigated for uses of force. 
 
 In the Jude study, researchers found data suggesting people withdraw from the system after an incident of police violence. Papachristos said the study shows that police violence and other misconduct hurts officers' ability to work with communities and may result in a deepening of so-called "legal cynicism" — the idea that police are either unable or unwilling to help — within communities. That dynamic can perpetuate crime and distrust. 
 
 "Our contribution is putting this into cause and effect. Here's what happened and there's a very clear change in behavior. That's what we showed," Papachristos told the Journal Sentinel. "I really think the big takeaway is the effect that cynicism has on black communities. 
 
 "Not only does it impede sort of their view of the law, it actually further impedes their own safety." 
 
 'Blue wall of silence' 
 
 In October 2004, Jude, another black man and two women went to a late-night off-duty police party in Bay View. They stayed a short time, felt unwelcome and left. 
 
 But before the four could leave, off-duty officers surrounded their truck and pulled the men out, accusing them of stealing officer Andrew Spengler's badge. The other man, Lovell Harris, broke free and ran. 
 
 Jude was surrounded by off-duty officers and beaten savagely as he was down and handcuffed on the street. The officers kicked Jude in the head and body, cut off his pants, yanked back his fingers, jammed pens deep into both of his ears and put a gun to his head as they yelled racial slurs, according to court testimony. An on-duty officer arrived but rather than stop it, he joined in the beating. 
 
 Jude was arrested, put in a police wagon and taken to the hospital where he remained for several days. No badge was found; no charges were filed. 
 
 After the beating, none of the off-duty police officers at the scene would talk to internal department investigators, forming what officials would later call a "blue wall of silence." 
 
 Three months after the beating, in February 2005, the Journal Sentinel investigation publicly showed Jude's battered face and reported that no officers had been arrested or charged in the incident. 
 
 Three officers were later charged in state court but were acquitted. A subsequent FBI investigation resulted in charges against those three plus five other officers. Seven were convicted and one acquitted. The three main culprits received prison terms between 15 and 17 years. 
 
 Jude sued the city, eventually settling for $2 million. Jude, 38, of Wauwatosa, has been arrested and charged several times since the beating and is currently in jail, awaiting trial on charges of obstruction of a police officer in Milwaukee County. 
 
 Police calls fall 
 
 Immediately after the Journal Sentinel investigation into the Jude beating, there were calls for accountability by the public and elected officials, and protest marches. 
 
 In the days after the story, state prosecutors said they were noticing the Jude beating being mentioned during questioning in jury selection, especially by black jurors who expressed distrust in the system. The prosecutors called it "the Jude effect." 
 
 There was another effect unfolding at the same time, the study found. Calls to police were falling in black neighborhoods. 
 
 There was no drop off in 911 calls right after Jude was beaten, in October 2004, but that changed when Jude's picture was published in the Journal Sentinel in February 2005. 
 
 To test if all calls went down for an unforeseen reason, the authors examined traffic-related 911 calls under the theory that they would not be affected by the Jude beating because people report crashes for practical reasons like insurance coverage. The authors found the traffic calls did not drop. 
 
 In the six months after 911 calls began to drop, there was an increase in homicides, the study noted. The researchers looked at homicides because unlike other crimes, the numbers would not be affected by the lack of crime reporting. 
 
 There were 87 homicides in the six months after Jude's beating became public, which was the highest in the seven-year period studied, from 2004 to 2010. 
 
 The authors did not list the increase in homicides under the study's findings, but they examined it as a possible effect of the drop in 911 calls. 
 
 Desmond said they could not, in this study, definitely say the drop in calls is the reason homicides spiked, but added, "I think the pattern of homicide data does suggest the drop in crime reporting in the immediate aftermath of Frank Jude might have contributed to that spike in a major way." 
 
 The study found that the calls to 911 from black neighborhoods did not rebound when officers were charged or fired. Rather, the calls simply came back slowly on their own, Desmond said. The authors think that's because residents realized they had no alternative but to use the system. 
 
 Second case, similar pattern 
 
 Researchers found another drop in 911 calls, this time after publication of a separate Journal Sentinel investigation that examined injuries suffered by 19-year-old Simpson in May 2006. 
 
 Milwaukee police officer James Langer hit Simpson in the face with a flashlight, breaking Simpson’s eye socket and cheekbone while responding to a complaint of public urination. Soon after the department began an internal investigation, Langer quit. Prosecutors declined to prosecute him. 
 
 The Journal Sentinel found Langer used force far more often than fellow officers and hit people with a flashlight at least three times during his three years on the job. 
 
 The Journal Sentinel investigation first reported on Simpson's injuries and published a picture of his bloodied face in February 2007. Shortly after that story was published, 911 calls again began to drop in black Milwaukee neighborhoods, the study found. 
 
 The authors did not examine effects on the homicide numbers after Simpson's injuries became public. Figures show that homicides in 2007 were down compared with the months after the Jude beating. 
 
 The researchers also tested to see if police violence in other cities had an effect on 911 calls in Milwaukee. The results were mixed. In the case of Sean Bell who was fatally shot in late 2006 in New York, they found calls here dropped. However, 911 calls in Milwaukee did not appear to be affected by the fatal police shooting of Oscar Grant in the subway in Oakland in early 2009. 
 
 There have been many more incidents of high-profile in-custody deaths in recent years. In the light of the new study, there are natural questions: Are 911 calls dropping in black neighborhoods in Tulsa or will they in San Diego? Is this a possible explanation for why Milwaukee, St. Louis and Baltimore saw large spikes in homicides last year? 
 
 Based on what they found in Milwaukee, Desmond and his fellow researchers say those are areas ripe for more study. 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://on.jsonl.in/2dET8HL ||||| The first study of its kind found 911 calls in black Milwaukee neighborhoods dropped significantly following the beating of Frank Jude, an unarmed black man. And then crime rates rose. 
 
 A man raises his fist during a protest Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2016, in El Cajon, Calif. A new study offers numerical evidence high-profile police violence leads black communities to call 911 to report crimes less. 
 
 In 2004, Frank Jude Jr., an unarmed black man, was viciously beaten by at least 10 white, off-duty police officers outside a housewarming party in Milwaukee because they said he stole one of their badges. 
 
 When the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel broke the news more than three months later, not one of the police officers had been charged or arrested, even though the city knew who they were. 
 
 In the six months that followed, 911 calls from black neighborhoods to report crimes plummeted as the city’s murder rate jumped. The decline in 911 calls is symptomatic of a loss of confidence in law enforcement, according to the study and criminal justice experts. And that trust deficit then leads to rising violent crime rates. 
 
 “An important implication of this finding is that publicized cases of police violence not only threaten the legitimacy and reputation of law enforcement; they also – by driving down 911 calls – thwart the suppression of law breaking, obstruct the application of justice, and ultimately make cities as a whole, and the black community in particular less safe,” reads the study, “Police Violence and Citizen Crime Reporting in the Black Community,” that will appear in the October edition of the American Sociological Review. 
 
 These are the results of a study of the effect high-profile excessive force by police against unarmed black men have on an entire community, which Matthew Desmond, the lead author and a sociologist at Harvard University, said is the first empirical study of its kind. 
 
 The mistrust and, perhaps, discontent the study shows in Milwaukee has been mirrored in similar cases across the country in the decade since, with flashpoints in Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore, Chicago, and now Charlotte, N.C. At the same time, the number of people murdered in the country in 2015 experienced the first substantial increase in a quarter-century, leading many to ask why. 
 
 Some observers have argued that police, in the face of public scrutiny, have pulled back from their duties, the so-called “Ferguson Effect.” But the soon-to-be published study offers empirical evidence to the contrary. Police have not stopped doing their job. Nor has gang violence turned city blocks into war zones. Rather, the deaths of young black men at the hands of law enforcement can lead whole communities, distrustful of police, to withdraw from the country’s criminal justice system. 
 
 “What this paper does is add something very important to the understanding of what those mechanisms are,” says David Kennedy, director of the National Network for Safe Communities, a project at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. "Breaches in the confidence that communities have in the police, themselves, lead to disengagement in the criminal justice system, which leads to increased violence and crime." 
 
 “It makes absolutely perfect sense that when communities have experience in what they regard as an egregious instance of police behavior, they are less interested and less willing to cooperate with the police,” continues Mr. Kennedy, who was not involved in the study. “Now the study says that. It’s not just conjecture. It’s as close as we get in social science to fact. And that’s connected to very substantial increases in violence.” 
 
 The study was conducted by Dr. Desmond and two other sociologists, Andrew Papachristos at Yale University, and David Kirk at the University of Oxford. They looked at every crime-related 911 call in Milwaukee from March 2004 to December 2010. They calculated that in the six months after the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel broke the news that Mr. Jude was left bloody and half-naked in the street, the number of crime-related 911 calls in the city decreased by about 22,000, to about 110,000. Fifty-six percent of this decline occurred in predominantly black neighborhoods. 
 
 The number of crime-related 911 calls would return to normal after about a year, the authors found. However, the six-month decrease from March through August 2005 led to the most violent stretch in the seven years the authors looked at. During those six months, there were 87 murders in Milwaukee, a 32-percent increase compared to the same six-month periods in 2004 and 2006. 
 
 The number of 911 calls in all Milwaukee neighborhoods also declined significantly following the high-profile killing of Sean Bell by police in Queens, N.Y. in 2006, suggesting the fallout of police violence is not an “isolated incident,” as the authors write “police departments and city politicians often frame [it].” 
 
 African Americans’ lack of confidence in police has been well documented through surveys and testimonies. Just this week, 9-year-old Zianna Oliphant was filmed telling the Charlotte City Council about being black. 
 
 “I don’t like being treated differently,” she said through tears at the City Council’s first meeting since Keith Lamont Scott was killed in an officer-involved shooting six days earlier. 
 
 The Pew Research Center has consistently found African Americans don’t trust police will treat them equally to whites. Following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, 46 percent of black respondents told Pew they had “very little” confidence in police to treat them equally. 
 
 But observers have debated over whether a lack of confidence in police has led African Americans to not report crime. It doesn’t, according to a 2006 study by Lawrence Bobo and Victor Thompson. A vast of majority of both whites and black respondents said they would call 911 if their house was burglarized, even if an overwhelmingly majority of blacks didn’t expect to be taken seriously when police arrived. 
 
 This changes in the wake of high-profile police violence in the news, according to the soon-to-be published study. It is perceived by some as a “severe breach in the social contract that exists between citizens and the criminal justice system.” 
 
 “That breach is so sudden and violent when unarmed black men are beaten or killed that virtually no institutional response, from public apologies to sanctioning offending officers, can swiftly repair it,” the study says. 
 
 In an interview with the Monitor, Tony Brown, a sociologist at Rice University who studies how racism works, was skeptical of the implications of the study. He praised its analysis, but said the personal motivations that led whole neighborhoods to call 911 less frequently must be studied further. He also stressed the conclusions should be considered within a larger context, namely how the country and its race relations have changed since 2005, and speculated about the so-called “Ferguson Effect,” which FBI Director James Comey referred to in May, but many criminologists and President Obama have rejected. 
 
 Whatever those motivations, Dr. Kirk at Oxford said in a statement that police should take seriously the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, in particular its recommendations for procedural justice, transparency, and accountability. 
 
 Mr. Kennedy at John Jay says many departments are. 
 
 “For the longest time, police never criticized police. That’s a real problem for communities that already don’t think highly of you,” he says. “Across the country, we’re just beginning to see police are willing to say to their community, ‘I think that’s wrong too.’ That’s an important development.” ||||| Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
– The so-called "Ferguson Effect" says homicides go up after high-profile police-on-citizen violence because police become too worried about being investigated for use of force. But the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports a new study published Thursday has another explanation. Researchers found that 911 calls related to crime dropped 20% in Milwaukee following the horrific beating of unarmed black man Frank Jude by off-duty cops in 2004. The effect lasted for more than a year, totaling more than 22,000 fewer crime-related 911 calls, according to the Atlantic. And 56% of the decrease occurred in black neighborhoods, despite black neighborhoods making up only 31% of Milwaukee. Researchers are calling it the "Jude effect." Researchers found similar declines after police killed Sean Bell in 2006 in New York City and assaulted Danyall Simpson in 2007 in Milwaukee. Police violence "de-legitimizes the criminal justice system in the eyes of the African-American community," researcher Matthew Desmond tells the Journal Sentinel. The study concludes that incidents of police violence "make the city as a whole...less safe," the Christian Science Monitor reports. Jude's beating was followed by a 32% increase in murders in Milwaukee. The spike in homicides can potentially be attributed to the drop in 911 calls, which are used by police for all sorts of crime fighting. "No act of police violence is an isolated incident, in both cause and consequence." the Atlantic quotes researcher Andrew Papachristos as saying. (Man dies three days after calling police for help.)