POLICE INTEGRITY LOST

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.

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.