Scaling the Queue: Reinforcement Learning for Equitable Call Classification Capacity in NYC Municipal Complaint Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces an equity-focused reinforcement learning framework to improve call classification in NYC municipal complaint systems, aiming to enhance throughput and reduce racial and income disparities.

Contribution

It develops a novel RL-based approach that acts as an intelligent routing system to address capacity bottlenecks and promote equitable service delivery across multiple domains.

Findings

RL agents improve complaint routing efficiency.

Complaint recurrence and neighborhood stats predict violations better.

The approach reduces historical equity gaps.

Abstract

Municipal 311 call centers and complaint intake systems face a structural mismatch between incoming volume and classification capacity. The staff and heuristics available to triage, route, and prioritize complaints cannot scale with demand. This bottleneck produces differential service quality that follows income and racial lines (\cite{liu2024sla}). We develop an equity-centered reinforcement learning (RL) framework that augments call classification capacity across six New York City Department of Buildings (DOB) operational domains: boiler safety, crane and derrick oversight, heat and hot water complaints, housing complaint triage, scaffold safety, and Natural Area District (SNAD) protection. Rather than replacing human classifiers, our agents act as intelligent intake routers: learning to assign incoming complaints to action categories: escalate, batch, defer, inspect now. The proposed technique is designed to maximize throughput, minimize misclassification cost, and actively narrow historical equity gaps in service delivery. We formalize each domain as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) in which equitable classification coverage is a first-class reward objective. Post-hoc SHAP attribution reveals that complaint recurrence and neighborhood-level statistics are stronger predictors of actionable violations than raw complaint volume. This finding has direct implications for complaint routing given the demographic correlates of those features.