POLICE INTEGRITY LOST

The Henry A. Wallace Police Crime Database was recently updated to include approximately 1,200 cases of nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers who were arrested in the year 2014. The searchable database website now includes summary information on 10,287 criminal arrest cases from the years 2005-2014 involving 8,495 individual nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers, each of whom were charged with one or more crimes. The arrested officers were employed by 3,429 state, local, and special law enforcement agencies across the United States located in 1,486 counties and independent cities in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The Henry A. Wallace Police Crime Database was recently updated with changes to 787 cases. The current database version is v.052018.1238. Most of the updates involve reduction in missing data to one or more variables in a case (often related to criminal case dispositions and/or final adverse employment outcomes). The database currently includes information on 9,088 criminal arrest cases from the years 2005-2013 involving 7,518 individual nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers, each of whom were charged with one or more crimes. The arrested officers were employed by 3,140 state, local, and special law enforcement agencies located in 1,402 counties and independent cities in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The next scheduled update to the database will include the addition of more than 1,000 arrest cases from year 2014 to be added prior to the end of December 2018.

The Henry A. Wallace Police Crime Database now includes 1,082 arrest cases from the year 2013. The searchable database has summary information on 9,088 criminal arrest cases from the years 2005-2013 involving 7,518 individual nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers across the United States, each of whom were charged with one or more crimes. The arrested officers were employed by 3,140 state and local law enforcement agencies located in 1,402 counties and independent cities in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. We plan on adding data on officers arrested in year 2014 to the database no later than December 2018.

This week we launched The Henry A. Wallace Police Crime Database. It is a publicly available web-based searchable database of nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers who were arrested for one or more crimes during the years 2005 through 2012. The database currently includes summary information on 8,006 criminal arrest cases involving 6,596 individual nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers, each of whom were charged with one or more crimes. The arrested officers were employed by 2,830 state, local, and special law enforcement agencies located in 1,302 counties and independent cities in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Arrest case data are searchable by location that generate heat-maps and also searchable by specific criminal offenses and offense characteristics. The database will be updated periodically, with additional cases added annually. Arrest cases from the year 2013 will be added during Fall 2017. We anticipate adding 2014 arrest data in late 2018, and so on.

Episode 42 of the Police Integrity Lost Podcast – Police Shootings, TASERs, and Police Accountability – is now available for streaming and downloading on iTunes.

There have been 83 nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers with the general powers of arrest (e.g., police officers, deputy sheriffs, state troopers, etc.) who have been arrested for murder or manslaughter resulting from an on-duty shooting where the officer shot and killed someone since the beginning of 2005. Of those 83 officers, to date only 30 have been convicted of a crime resulting from the on-duty shooting (14 by guilty plea, 16 by jury trial, and none by a bench trial).

In the cases where an officer has been convicted, it is often for a lesser offense. Only 5 officers have been convicted of murder (in four of those cases the murder convictions were overturned, but the officers were later convicted of federal crimes arising out of the same incident). As to the other officers, 11 were convicted of manslaughter, 4 were convicted of voluntary manslaughter, 6 were convicted of involuntary manslaughter, 2 were convicted of official misconduct, 1 was convicted of reckless homicide, and 1 was convicted of federal criminal deprivation of civil rights.

The criminal cases for 38 of the officers ended in a non-conviction: 20 were acquitted at a jury trial, 7 were acquitted at a bench trial, 4 were dismissed by a judge, 6 were dismissed by a prosecutor, and in one instance no true bill was returned from a grand jury. The criminal cases for 15 of the officers are still pending today.

Location by state of officers arrested for murder or manslaughter resulting from on-duty shootings:
2 – Alabama
4 – Arkansas
2 – Arizona
3 – California
2 – Colorado
1 – Connecticut
3 – Florida
6 – Georgia
1 – Illinois
1 – Indiana
1 – Kentucky
10 – Louisiana
1 – Maryland
2 – Michigan
1 – Minnesota
3 – Missouri
3 – Mississippi
2 – North Carolina
1 – New Jersey
2 – New Mexico
6 – New York
5 – Ohio
4 – Oklahoma
1 – Pennsylvania
4 – South Carolina
1 – Tennessee
4 – Texas
1 – Utah
4 – Virginia
1 – Washington
1 – Wisconsin

Location by state of officers who were convicted:
1 – Alabama
2 – Arkansas
1 – Arizona
2 – California
1 – Colorado
3 – Georgia
1 – Kentucky
7 – Louisiana
1 – Missouri
1 – New York
3 – Oklahoma
3 – South Carolina
1 – Tennessee
3 – Virginia

Location by state of officers who were not convicted:
2 – Arkansas
1 – Colorado
1 – Connecticut
1 – Florida
1 – Georgia
1 – Indiana
2 – Louisiana
1 – Maryland
2 – Michigan
1 – Minnesota
1 – Missouri
1 – Mississippi
2 – North Carolina
1 – New Jersey
2 – New Mexico
4 – New York
5 – Ohio
1 – Oklahoma
1 – Pennsylvania
1 – South Carolina
2 – Texas
1 – Utah
1 – Virginia
1 – Washington
1 – Wisconsin

The 244 variable data set in Phil Stinson’s study, Study of Sworn Nonfederal Law Enforcement Officers Arrested in the United States, 2005-2011 (ICPSR 35648), was deposited with the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data pursuant to the requirements of NIJ Award No. 2011-IJ-CX-0024. It it available at the Inter-university Consortium of Political & Social Research to qualified university-affiliated researchers as a restricted use data set. For more information, go to http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/studies/35648