POLICE INTEGRITY LOST

BGSU Professor Phil Stinson will speak at a meeting of the Northwest Ohio Municipal/County Judges Association on Tuesday, January 22, 2013, in Perrysburg, Ohio. Stinson will discuss his recent research findings on officer-involved domestic violence (OIDV) and specifically address issues relating to the Lautenberg Amendment. The 1997 Lautenberg Amendment to the federal Gun Control Act prohibits anyone (including military and law enforcement officers) who has been convicted of a qualified misdemeanor crime of domestic violence from possessing a firearm or ammunition.

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.

Phil Stinson and John Liederbach are recording a series of podcast audio recordings discussing their research findings resulting from the NIJ-funded research project. The podcasts are available on iTunes and can be accessed by clicking here. New episodes will be posted monthly. The August episode, Police Drug Corruption, discusses findings from their recently completed study on 221 drug-related arrests of 188 sworn law enforcement officers. The September podcast episode is on Officer-involved Domestic Violence.