The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health calls for police service

Koziarski, Jacek

doi:10.1186/s40163-021-00157-6

Cited by 14 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 46 publications

(53 reference statements)

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“…Similarity, unsurprisingly, was found to be much stronger at street segments. As such, while previous research has shown that PwPMI calls for service increased in Barrie during the COVID-19 pandemic relative to what would have been expected had the pandemic not occurred (Koziarski, 2021b), the findings here suggest that an overwhelming majority of these calls occurred in the very same place as in previous years. More research is certainly needed that not only conducts a more direct investigation into the effect of the pandemic on the spatial patterns of PwPMI calls for service, but the reasons as to why PwPMI calls appear to occur in the same place year-over-year, even during a pandemic.…”

Section: Research Implicationscontrasting

confidence: 62%

The spatial (in)stability of mental health calls for police service

Koziarski

2022

Criminology & Public Policy

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Research summary Inspired by studies on crime concentration, scholars have begun examining the spatial patterns of other issues under the police mandate, such as calls for service involving persons with perceived mental illness (PwPMI). While findings show that PwPMI calls for service concentrate in a few number of places, we do not know whether the concentration of these calls fall within a narrow bandwidth of spatial units nor whether these calls are spatially stable. Drawing on 7 years of calls for service data from the Barrie Police Service, this study tests for the temporal stability of PwPMI call for service concentrations at two units of spatial analysis and applies a longitudinal variation of the Spatial Point Pattern Test to assess the spatial stability of these calls at both the global and local levels. The results reveal that concentrations of PwPMI calls for service not only fall within a narrow proportional bandwidth of spatial units, but are spatially stable, even during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Policy implications Existing police‐ and community‐based efforts that respond to PwPMI in the community are tasked with responding to crises that could have been prevented with timelier intervention. Drawing from crime‐focused, place‐based policing strategies whose deployment is informed by the spatial concentration of crime, scholars have similarly argued that knowledge on where PwPMI calls for service concentrate can be leveraged to inform and deploy place‐based efforts whose focus is to assist PwPMI in a proactive capacity. The findings of the present study further substantiates the deployment of PwPMI‐focused police‐ and community‐based resources as proactive, place‐based efforts. In doing so, these efforts could not only prevent mental health crises from occurring but could prevent future police‐involved calls for service and thus reduce the footprint of the police in the lives of PwPMI in a reactive capacity.

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Section: Research Implicationscontrasting

confidence: 62%

The spatial (in)stability of mental health calls for police service

Koziarski

2022

Criminology & Public Policy

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“…To assess whether the intervention significantly impacts the outcomes, BSTS then models the difference between the real outcome line with the invention and the estimated trend line without the invention (Brodersen et al, 2015 ). BSTS has been recently used in numerous studies to measure the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in various fields such as the public bicycle share system (Li et al, 2021 ), the stock market (Feng & Li, 2022 ) and mental health calls (Koziarski, 2021 ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of COVID-19 on online grocery shopping discussion and behavior reflected from Google Trends and geotagged tweets

2023

Comput.Urban Sci.

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People express opinions, make connections, and disseminate information on social media platforms. We considered grocery-related tweets as a proxy for grocery shopping behaviors or intentions. We collected data from January 2019 to January 2022, representing three typical times of the normal period before the COVID-19 pandemic, the outbreak period, and the widespread period. We obtained grocery-related geotagged tweets using a search term index based on the top 10 grocery chains in the US and compiled Google Trends online grocery shopping data. We performed a topic modeling analysis using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), and verified that most of the collected tweets were related to grocery-shopping demands or experiences. Temporal and geographical analyses were applied to investigate when and where people talked more about groceries, and how COVID-19 affected them. The results show that the pandemic has been gradually changing people’s daily shopping concerns and behaviors, which have become more spread throughout the week since the pandemic began. Under the causal impact of COVID-19, people first experienced panic buying groceries followed by pandemic fatigue a year later. The normalized tweet counts show a decrease of 40% since the pandemic began, and the negative causal effect can be considered statistically significant (p-value = 0.001). The variation in the quantity of grocery-related tweets also reflects geographic diversity in grocery concerns. We found that people in non-farm areas with less population and relatively lower levels of educational attainment tend to act more sensitively to the evolution of the pandemic. Utilizing the COVID-19 death cases and consumer price index (CPI) for food at home as background information, we proposed an understanding of the pandemic’s impact on online grocery shopping by assembling, geovisualizing, and analyzing the evolution of online grocery behaviors and discussion on social media before and during the pandemic.

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“…Furthermore, the geographic distribution of mental health-related calls was more evenly spread throughout the city during COVID-19 ( Lersch, 2020 ). Koziarski (2021) focused on CFS involving persons with a perceived mental illness in Barrie, Ontario, Canada. Results from the time series analyses indicated that COVID-19 had a delayed impact on mental health-related calls, with significant increases observed beginning in October 2020.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Two areas of police work that have received attention in relation to the pandemic are calls for service (CFS) and proactive police activities. Several studies have examined changes to CFS patterns either for specific call types ( Demir & Park, 2021 ; Koziarski, 2021 ; Lersch, 2020 ; Miller, Segal, & Spencer, 2021 ; Nix & Richards, 2021 ) or more generally across multiple call types and/or jurisdictions ( Ashby, 2020 ; Dai, Xia, & Han, 2021 ; Mohler et al, 2020 ; White, Orosco, & Terpstra, 2022 ). Collectively, the results indicate that CFS trends have not been uniform, with variation observed between cities or call type (e.g., Ashby, 2020 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%