POLICE INTEGRITY LOST

The March 2013 episode of the Police Integrity Lost podcast is Using Google News for Data Collection: Police Crime Research Methods Part 2. In this podcast episode, Steve Brewer (Penn State Shenango) and John Liederbach (Bowling Green State University) question Phil Stinson (Bowling Green State University) on his use of the Google News search engine and Google Alerts as part of his research methodology to collect data for research studies on police crime in the United States.

In this episode of the Police Integrity Lost podcast, Phil Stinson and John Liederbach discuss late-stage police crime. Stinson and Liederbach are both professors in the Criminal Justice Program at Bowling Green State University. Their study on late-stage police crime Exit Strategy: An Exploration of Late-Stage Police Crime was published in 2010 in the refereed journal Police Quarterly. The purpose of the study was to examine the character of police arrests known to the media. Cases were identified through a content analysis of news coverage using the internet-based Google News ^TM search engine and its Google News Alerts ^TM email update service search tool. The study is important because there were previously no exhaustive statistics available on the crimes committed by law enforcement officers, and only a small number of studies provide specific data on police crimes. The study focuses on the crimes committed by experienced officers who are approaching retirement. The occurrence of these late-stage crimes presents a challenge to existing assumptions regarding the relationship between experience and various forms of police misconduct, and also provides an opportunity to examine a stage of the police career that has not been the subject of much research. In this podcast episode Stinson and Liederbach discuss the research and policy implications, as well as how their data should be interpreted within the context of existing studies on police socialization and the production of misconduct.

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.