POLICE INTEGRITY LOST

A research brief article by Phil Stinson and John Liederbach entitled Misconduct by Experienced Police Officers is published in the November 2012 issue of Police Chief Magazine.  The article briefly summarizes the 2010 study on late-stage police crime where Stinson and Liederbach found that almost 20% of police officers arrested occurred late in officer’s careers, often on the cusp of retirement, at 18 or more years of service.

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.

Phil Stinson and John Liederbach–together with several colleagues–will present findings of two of their recent research studies related to police crime and police integrity at the annual conference of the American Society of Criminology (ASC) in Chicago, IL, on November 15, 2012.

The first presentation, Drunk Driving Cops: A Study of Police Officers Arrested for DUI, 2005-2010, will highlight various predictors of two outcome variables: job loss and criminal case disposition. The study sample consists of data related to 782 DUI cases where 750 sworn officers were arrested during the years 2005-2010. The arrested officers were employed by 511 non-federal state and local law enforcement agencies located in 406 counties and independent cities in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The second presentation is entitled CHAID Analysis of Drug-related Police Corruption Arrests. This study analyzed data on 221 drug-related cases where non-federal sworn law enforcement officers were arrested during the years 2005-2007. Findings show that drug-related police corruption involves a wide range of criminal offenses, and cocaine is the most prevalent drug. Older officers is are less likely than younger officers to lose their jobs after a drug-related arrest.