Voice-based cues can bias emergency dispatchers before first responders arrive

Evidence

As we have outlined above, the following stages and agents involved in this process—the dispatcher and the first responders—might also play a crucial role in determining how often they occur and how severe these incidents turn out to be. A second step in this line of research would entail analyzing these calls for factors such as accent, intonation, pitch, intensity, and volume. Studies have shown that, for instance, different accents are stereotypically associated with different social classes (Krauss & Pardo, 2006); thus, in this context, where the only means of communication occurs through the phone, such characteristics might be particularly important because they have the potential to affect decision-making. For instance, if the caller’s vocal characteristics suggest that they belong to a high socioeconomic class, will the dispatcher be more likely to prioritize this call, compared to when the caller sounds like they belong to a lower socioeconomic class? Furthermore, paraverbal cues, such as shakiness of voice, could also signal how much stress or threat the caller is experiencing, and the way they interpret these emotional states might influence how they transmit this information to the first responders. Therefore, analyzing these audio recordings could also provide important insights into the kind of bias that first responders enter these encounters with. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 296

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to research on phonetic/accent stereotyping and to the earlier chapters on how bias enters emergency response systems; also echoes work on paraverbal cues and credibility judgments.
• SEED: Could form an angle: ‘the sound of an emergency call’ — how dispatcher bias rooted in voice can be a hidden gatekeeper that amplifies or dampens racial profiling downstream.