POLICE INTEGRITY LOST

Google News launched ten years ago this week. The same technology that generates the Google News site also powers the Google News search engine. According to founder Krishna Bharat, Google News “now draws from more than 50,000 news sources” worldwide, and Google News and the Google News search engine together “connect 1 billion unique users a week to news content.” That’s right, 1 billion unique users a week.

The Google News search engine and the Google Alerts email update service are the primary data source for our police integrity research study on police officers arrested throughout the United States. Since the beginning of 2005, to date we have used Google News to identify 7,097 arrest cases of 6,101 individual non-federal sworn law enforcement officers.

Phil Stinson and John Liederbach’s article reporting their research study on officer-involved domestic violence (OIDV), “Fox in the Henhouse: A Study of Police Officers Arrested for Crimes associated with Domestic and/or Family Violence,” has been prepublished in OnLineFirst at the peer-reviewed journal Criminal Justice Policy Review.

ABSTRACT: The problem of violence within police families has been increasingly recognized as an important sociolegal issue, but there is a lack of empirical data on what has commonly been referred to as officer-involved domestic violence (OIDV). There are no comprehensive statistics available on OIDV and no government entity collects data on the criminal conviction of police officers for crimes associated with domestic and/or family violence. Prior self-report officer surveys are limited by the tendency to conceal instances of family violence and the interests of officers to maintain a “code of silence” to protect their careers. The purpose of the current study is to provide empirical data on OIDV cases. The study identifies and describes cases in which police were arrested for criminal offenses associated with an incident of family and/or domestic violence through a content analysis of published newspaper articles. Data on these cases is presented in terms of the arrested officer, employing agency, victim, charged offense(s), and criminal case dispositions. The paper includes a discussion regarding OIDV and policy implications.

A research brief on officer-involved domestic violence (OIDV) by Phil Stinson & John Liederbach is published as an article in the September 2012 issue of Police Chief Magazine. The article is designed with the purpose of making our research results accessible to law enforcement practitioners.