Collaborative gatekeeping: Consensus-seeking practices among emergency call-takers

Abstract

Abstract The police are involved in many aspects of social life in the US, and much of their involvement stems from the emergency call-for-service system. Emergency call-takers play a crucial role in this system by filtering out inappropriate caller requests, but prior policing scholarship has overlooked the dynamic, interactional, and improvisational aspects of this work. This article illuminates these elements of gatekeeping by uncovering a set of consensus-seeking practices call-takers deploy over the telephone to collaboratively reframe callers’ problems as policeable or not. These findings help reconceptualize gatekeeping as a more fluid concept than prior scholarship has understood it to be. They also offer new avenues for organizational reform that include the study and dissemination of practices that call-takers use to process calls. Furthermore, these findings encourage agencies to move beyond exclusively rule-bound forms of guidance and pursue a practice-based reform agenda to help redefine the limits of the police role.