POLICE INTEGRITY LOST

The November 2012 episode of the Police Integrity Lost podcast is entitled Police Criminal Misuse of TASERs. In this episode of the podcast, Bowling Green State University criminal justice professors Phil Stinson and John Liederbach discuss their recent research study on police misconduct involving conductive energy devices. The study Police Crime and Less-than-Lethal Coercive Force: A Description of the Criminal Misuse of TASERs was published earlier this year in International Journal of Police Science & Management. It explores and describes the nature and character of cases involving the criminal misuse of TASERs by police officers through a content analysis of news articles. The news-based content analysis identified 24 state and local police officers in the United States who were arrested for crimes involving inappropriate use of TASERs over a 65-month period from January 2005 to May 2010. In the podcast episode, Stinson and Liederbach discuss some factors that were common among these events, especially with regard to the actions and motivations of the arrested officers and how the situational context appeared to influence the criminal misconduct of officers. The findings of the research study indicate that the cases examined did not involve much, if any, situational risk to the officer. The criminal misuse of TASERs seems more likely to involve suspects who are already handcuffed, or even citizens who are clearly not criminals at all. The Police Integrity Lost podcast is distributed exclusively on iTunes.