How Calling 911 Can Lead Police To Making You A Suspect

Research Shows How Investigators Misjudge Callers’ Voices, Emotions

ITHACA, N.Y. — Calling 911 should be straightforward. Someone witnesses a crime, picks up the phone, and reports what happened. But new research reveals a troubling reality: the very people trying to help can find themselves targeted as suspects, simply because they don’t sound the “right” way during one of the most stressful moments of their lives.

A pre-print study involving nearly 2,000 participants across four separate experiments found that both laypeople and police officers judge 911 callers based on behavioral expectations that research suggests are not reliable indicators of guilt. When callers violate these expectations by seeming too calm, too emotional, or failing to provide information in the “correct” manner, they trigger suspicion that can snowball into full-blown criminal investigations.

“Citizens engaging in the well-intentioned act of calling 911 risk observers—including police—holding expectations for their behavior and targeting them as a suspect if they violate those expectations,” the researchers wrote.

Importantly, the results should not keep you from calling the police in an emergency situation. Among study limitations, the authors note that real 911 calls provided ecological validity, albeit with less control over variables, whereas simulated calls used in the study allowed for tighter control but potentially reduced realism.

The study, led by researchers from Cornell University and Arizona State University, analyzed real and simulated 911 calls to identify which behaviors sparked suspicion. Participants listened to calls reporting violent crimes and rated callers on measures including urgency, emotionality, cognitive load, and whether they seemed to be managing information or their impressions.

The Emotion Paradox

Perhaps the most striking finding: between 77% and 85% of participants spontaneously mentioned the caller’s emotional display when asked for their first impressions. Yet humans experiencing trauma exhibit wildly different emotional responses, from hysteria to numbness, depending on factors including personal history, relationship to the victim, and neurological differences like autism.

Callers perceived as more urgent and emotional drew less suspicion. Those who seemed to be carefully managing information or trying to control how they came across raised red flags. Cognitive load, or appearing to struggle with clear thinking, also increased suspicion in some studies.

Police officers showed patterns similar to laypeople, with one notable exception: officers rated male callers as significantly more suspicious than female callers, even when both genders recited identical scripts describing the same situation.

These judgments matter because suspicion often precedes formal accusations. Once someone becomes a suspect, research shows that confirmation bias can create a chain reaction throughout an investigation, with each piece of evidence interpreted through a lens of assumed guilt.

When Behavior Becomes Evidence

The paper documents several cases where 911 call behavior led directly to wrongful accusations and convictions. Gary Gauger was labeled “flat” during his call about his parents’ deaths and later coerced into a false confession before being exonerated. Sandra Ortiz’s “calm tone” was used against her at trial, leading to a wrongful murder conviction. Thomas Perez falsely confessed to killing his father after a dispatcher felt “something was off” because he seemed to lack concern and was “rambling.” Perez’s father was found alive days later.

Amanda Knox was described as both overly emotional and insufficiently emotional at different moments following her roommate’s murder. Robert Roberson currently faces execution based partly on the perception that he didn’t show enough emotion after his daughter’s death. He is autistic and does not express emotion in expected ways, but this neurological difference was not initially recognized or considered.

Making matters worse, a controversial police training called “911 linguistic analysis” has spread through law enforcement agencies despite lacking scientific support. The course, developed by a retired deputy, claims to teach officers how to identify guilty callers based on behavioral indicators like opening a call by saying “hello” or being overly polite to the dispatcher.

Multiple studies have failed to replicate the training’s central findings. One analysis currently in press found the method “failed to differentiate between deceptive ‘false allegation’ and truthful ‘true report’ callers.” Yet officers continue taking the training and citing it in investigations.

In the case of Jessica Logan, a mother who slept through her alarm to give her sick infant medicine and woke to find him not breathing, the investigating detective used the training’s checklist to claim her 911 call proved involvement in her son’s death.

The Mistaken Assumption

The Center for Substance Abuse Treatment notes that witnesses to violence often experience just as much trauma as direct victims. Initial reactions can include intense emotions manifesting physically through shaking or rapid breathing, or the opposite: numbness, dissociation, and withdrawal.

Personal history with trauma, cultural background regarding emotional expression, relationship to the victim, and proximity to the event all influence how someone reacts. Autistic individuals and others who are neurodivergent may process and express emotion differently than neurotypical people. As the researchers note, there is no “one size fits all” reaction to a traumatic event.

Yet the study found that people hold firm expectations anyway. Participants rated callers who violated these expectations as more suspicious and indicated police should investigate them further.

Psychologists have long documented the fundamental attribution error: people’s tendency to attribute others’ behavior to internal characteristics while underestimating external situational factors. Someone struggling to provide a coherent narrative on a 911 call might be doing so because they’re in cognitive overload from witnessing violence, not because they’re lying and trying to keep their story straight.

Observers, however, tend to interpret these behaviors as intentional deception rather than trauma responses or personality differences.

The study’s fourth experiment tested 88 real 911 calls with a diverse participant group. Even across this wider range of calls and situations, the patterns held. Urgency for the victim and emotionality predicted less suspicion. Perceived information management and impression management predicted more. Cognitive load also increased suspicion, particularly for male callers.

What Comes Next

Lead author Samantha Bean and her colleagues argue their findings reveal the starting point of a dangerous process. Once suspicion takes hold, investigators may approach the case with assumptions that warp how they interpret evidence, conduct interviews, and pursue leads.

“It is critical to examine why someone is initially suspected because research and anecdotal case evidence suggest that, once someone is a suspect, a chain reaction of confirmation bias can lead to a wrongful conviction,” the researchers wrote.

Study authors stopped short of recommending specific policy changes but emphasized that law enforcement and the public need better education about trauma responses and the limitations of behavioral analysis. Officers who understand that trauma has no script may be less likely to target innocent witnesses. Dispatcher training that focuses on gathering information rather than assessing caller credibility could help separate the act of reporting from the question of involvement.

For now, anyone who calls 911 faces an uncomfortable reality: the way they sound during a crisis could determine whether they’re treated as a helpful witness or a potential suspect. Someone who spent their life learning to stay calm under pressure might be suspected of not caring enough. Someone whose trauma response includes emotional flooding might be dismissed as overdramatic. Someone who struggles to think clearly while witnessing violence might appear to be hiding something.

Until law enforcement agencies and the broader public absorb that lesson, Good Samaritans who pick up the phone to report a crime will continue rolling the dice on whether their particular trauma response happens to match what observers expect.

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