POLICE INTEGRITY LOST

PROJECT ACCOMPLISHMENTS:

The purpose of the research project is to promote police integrity by gaining a better understanding of police crime and agency responses to officer arrests. The study provides a wealth of data on a phenomena that relates directly to police integrity—data that police executives have not previously had access to because this information did not exist in any useable format.

In the previous reporting period we substantially completed tasks 1-6 100% complete, task 7 was 15% complete, and task 11 was ongoing. We have since revised the project timeline on July 3, 2013, in conjunction with filing a request for a one-time six-month no-cost extension. Under the revised project timeline, tasks 1-4 are 100% complete, task 5 is 95% complete, task 6 is 75% complete, task 7 is 86.5% complete, task 10 is 82% complete, task 11 is ongoing, and task 12 is 15% complete. Tasks 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, and 16 have not yet been undertaken

As of the close of business on June 30, 2013, a total of 8,154 police crime arrest cases involving 6,853 individual officers have been logged in our integrated relational and digital imaging database. The arrested officers were employed by 2,903 nonfederal law enforcement agencies, in 1,339 counties and independent cities in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Of these, 6,658 cases involve 5,552 individual officers arrested for one or more crimes during the time period of January 1, 2005, through December 31, 2011 (1,073 arrest cases logged in were for officers arrested during the year 2012, and 423 arrest cases logged in were for officers arrested during 2013). Prior to January 1, 2013, there were 7,383 police crime arrest cases (involving 6,317 individual sworn law enforcement officers) that had previously been logged in our database. Thus, during this reporting period we added 771 new police crime arrest cases and 536 more sworn officers to our database (including 221 new cases involving 72 individual officers who were arrested during the years 2005-2011). In sum, during this reporting period, we expanded our database of known police crime arrest cases by 9.4% overall (an increase of 3.3% for the study years 2005-2011 arrest cases).

We continue to make enhancements to our project database, which utilizes an enterprise-level content management system, OnBase. Our project database now includes fully integrated digital imaging database with full-text OCR search capabilities, relational database, and video file database libraries. The integrated relational and digital imaging database includes electronic case log-in procedures and allows us to structure and search data in different ways for content analyses. During this reporting period we continued software integration with the project database.  We deployed a PC-based on-screen coding instrument using customized IBM/SPSS Data Collection/Data Entry Author/Interviewer modules. The new coding instrument system pulls information from the relational database into the coding instrument for each case to be coded, thus reducing coder duplication of effort and potential for coding errors. Beta testing and training on the IBM/SPSS coding instrument modules was completed in February 2013, and the product was fully deployed in March 2013. We also added a news media video file library database, and deployed a customized video document import processor (DIP) to electronically import and index video mp4 files that are cross-referenced with our enhanced relational database. The addition of the video files database allows us to triangulate data obtained from television news sources as a supplement to our other database libraries. We occasionally encounter programming and other technology-related problems. In the previous reporting period we successfully implemented a customized DIP to electronically import and index federal court PACER records into our OnBase project database. The PACER DIP ceased to operate several months ago and we are awaiting a fix for a computer programming issue from our university’s ITS department.

The digital imaging database includes 169,315 scanned pages of digital images, consisting of 16,863 TIFF case document files, 15,509 TIFF coding sheet document files, and 5,135 PDF PACER document files. Of these, 17,309 pages were added since January 1, 2013, consisting of 3,681 case document files and 4,127 coding sheet document files, and 3 PACER document files. The PACER files consist of 69,855 pages of federal court docket sheets, pleadings, court orders, and other docket entries. Additional PACER files are currently in queue to be electronically imported into and indexed in our OnBase project database using our customized automated PACER DIP when it is repaired. The new video database currently includes 868 news media mp4 video files.

In sum, our enhanced content management system database currently includes more than 170,000 pages of news articles, court records, news videos, and coding sheets that document the criminal arrests of more than 6,850 police officers since the beginning of 2005. The arrested officers were employed by nonfederal state, local, special, and tribal law enforcement agencies in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

We continued to learn that training (and routine periodic retraining) of graduate research assistants and the process of coding the content of case file records is more time-consuming and slower than we anticipated when we developed the project timeline. Crucial to completion of the remaining project tasks is the recent implementation of our PC-based coding instrument that replaced our paper-based coding sheets in March 2013. Currently the project timeline tasks are three to six months behind our original project schedule. We recently filed a request with NIJ for a one-time six-month no cost extension and revised the project timeline for numerous project tasks.

PROJECT GOALS:

There are three major goals of the project. The first goal of this research is to determine the nature and extent of police crime in the United States. The second goal is to determine what factors influence how a police organization responds to arrests of officers. The third and final goal of the research is to foster police integrity by exploring whether police crime and officer arrests correlate with other forms of police misconduct.

DISSEMINATION OF PROJECT RESULTS TO COMMUNITIES OF INTEREST:

Results have been disseminated to communities of interest through the writing and publication of refereed journal articles, magazine articles, and research briefs. We also maintain a project website and blog, and produce a monthly audio podcast that is available on iTunes.

We have proactively worked to disseminate our research results to communities of interest. To that end, we have engaged in outreach activities to reach members of communities who are not usually aware of these research activities, for the purpose of enhancing public understanding and increasing interest in learning and careers in criminological research. We have published two short research-brief articles reporting our research findings in Police Chief, a practitioner-oriented magazine published by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. A third research-brief article in Police Chief is forthcoming. We also make PDF copies of one-sheet research briefs explaining our research studies and findings on our web-site and post timely project-related entries on our blog. Additionally, we distribute audio podcasts on iTunes where we discuss the research project, studies, and related findings.

The web analytic reports for the Police Integrity Lost Project Blog indicate that for the time period January 1, 2013, through June 30, 2013, there were 564 unique visitors to the blog. Traffic to the blog was primarily from the United States (89.9%) where visitors to the blog were located in 128 cities in 37 states and the District of Columbia. There were also visitors to the blog from 22 foreign countries: Philippines, Canada, United Kingdom, Jordan, Australia, Brazil, Germany, France, Japan, Netherlands, Chile, Ethiopia, Germany, Croatia, Hungary, Indonesia, India, Maldives, Nepal, and South Africa.  Traffic to the blog included direct traffic (58.7%), search traffic (31.9%), and referral traffic (9.4%).

The Police Integrity Lost Podcast is available on iTunes domestically as well as internationally, and interested persons can stream, download, and/or subscribe to the podcast audio files directly from the iTunes client application. Web analytics for the iTunes podcast episodes indicates that for this reporting period there were 619 mp3 file hits, indicating that there were 619 instances when someone either streamed (listened to) all or part of one of our podcast episodes and/or downloaded mp3 audio files. Of those hits, the largest number of requests directed to our pod server to stream and/or download the mp3 audio files during this reporting period was 132 hits for the “Drunk Driving Cops” podcast episode (Police Integrity Lost Podcast Episode 9) and 95 hits for the “Using a Content Management System” podcast episode (Police Integrity Lost Podcast Episode 10). The web analytic reports for the iTunes podcast episodes are incomplete and/or missing for January and February 2013.

PLANS FOR NEXT REPORTING PERIOD TO ACCOMPLISH PROJECT GOALS:

Under the revised project timeline, tasks 1-4 are 100% complete, task 5 is 95% complete, task 6 is 75% complete, task 7 is 86.5% complete, task 10 is 82% complete, task  11 is ongoing, and task 12 is 15% complete. Tasks 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, and 16 have not yet been undertaken. During the next reporting period we will complete tasks 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, and will also continue making progress on tasks 11 and 12.

Currently, two research papers are under review for publication consideration at refereed journals.  One of those is a study on the nature of crime by school resource officers, and the second paper currently under review is a study exploring crime by policewomen. We are now working on three research papers studying police sexual misconduct arrests.

We present our research findings at two national conferences during the next reporting period.  On July 30, 2013, Dr. Stinson was an invited speaker at a mini-conference on police misconduct that was part of the annual conference of the American Psychological Association in Honolulu, Hawaii.  Dr. Stinson will also present findings of the project in November 2013 at the annual conference of the American Society of Criminology in Atlanta, Georgia.

We will continue to product our monthly podcast episodes for iTunes and disseminate research briefs on the various studies as completed.  The project website and blog will also be updated with new postings periodically.

PRODUCTS PRODUCED BY THE PROJECT:

The project has produced three peer-reviewed journal articles, two research brief magazine articles, six one-sheet research briefs, 12 mp3 audio podcast episodes, and eight research presentations.

CHANGES/PROBLEMS WITH THE PROJECT:

On July 13, 2013, we filed a request with NIJ for a six-month no-cost extension to complete the project.  The extension is necessary to complete the project because it has taken longer than anticipated to complete the content analysis component of the research.  As noted above, earlier this year we deployed a customized computer-based coding instrument to replace the paper-based coding sheets we previously used in this project.  The new coding instrument software module has allowed us to proceed with coding more efficiently and with greater speed and reliability moving forward.  We anticipate that we will have substantially completed the coding of content and entry of data into our master SPSS data set before the end of August 2013 or soon thereafter.  During September through December 2013, we will be conducting final PACER searches, finding supplemental information to reduce missing data in the master data set, performing interrater coder reliability assessments, and conducting statistical analyses of the data.  During January through March 2014 we will continue statistical analyses and draft the final technical report for submission to NIJ on or before March 31, 2014.  A revised project timeline was submitted with the request.

Stinson, Liederbach, Brewer & Todak’s article Drink, Drive, Go to Jail? A Study of Police Officers Arrested for Drunk Driving has recently been prepublished online by the Journal of Crime and Justice. The purpose of the study is to provide empirical data on cases of police driving under the influence (DUI) of alcohol and/or drugs. It identifies events that may have influenced the decision to arrest, including associated traffic accidents, fatalities, officer resistance, the refusal of field sobriety tests, and the refusal of blood alcohol content (BAC) tests. The study is a quantitative content analysis of news articles identified through the Google News search engine using 48 automated Google Alerts queries. Data are analyzed on 782 DUI arrest cases of officers employed by 511 nonfederal law enforcement agencies throughout the United States. The study is the only study known to describe police officer DUI arrests at many police agencies across the United States.

Police sexual misconduct remains an understudied area and little is known about the sexual crimes of police officers. In the June 2013 episode of the Police Integrity Lost podcast, Bowling Green State University professors Phil Stinson and John Liederbach discuss the findings of their recent study on sex-related police crime. The study analyzes a subset of data collected as part of Stinson’s larger study on police crime.

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.

The February 2013 episode of the Police Integrity Lost podcast features Phil Stinson (Bowling Green State University) and Steve Brewer (Penn State – Shenango) discussing their use of classification tree analysis (also called “decision tree” analysis) techniques as part of their predictive analytic statistical procedures in the study of police crime. Classification tree analysis is used as a statistical technique to uncover the causal pathways between independent predictors and an outcome (dependent) variable of interest in a regression model.

The Police Integrity Lost podcast is available exclusively on iTunes.

The purpose of the research project is to promote police integrity by gaining a better understanding of police crime and agency responses to officer arrests. The study provides a wealth of data on a phenomena that relates directly to police integrity—data that police executives have not previously had access to because this information did not exist in any useable format.

PROJECT ACCOMPLISHMENTS:

In the previous reporting period we substantially completed tasks 1-5 and 74.6% of task 6 on our project timeline. In this reporting period we completed task 6 (conduct PACER searches), started work on task 7 (code content of articles and other case documents), and continued to make progress on task 11 (analyze data and write articles) on our project timeline. The project timeline called for task 7 to be substantially completed during the months of August through December 2012. It has proven to be slower going than we projected, however, and are still coding documents relating to arrest cases in the first of four years (2008-2011) needing to be completed. The coding of content was slowed by enhanced training of new graduate research assistants who started work in August 2012, as well as by the fact that it is taking coders longer to complete the coding process for each case than anticipated. At the end of this reporting period, tasks 1-6 are 100% complete, and task 7 is 15% complete. Task 11 is ongoing.

As of the close of business on December 31, 2012, a total of 7,383 police crime arrest cases involving 6,317 individual officers have been logged in our integrated relational and digital imaging database. Of these, 6,437 cases involve 5,480 individual officers arrested for one or more crimes during the time period of January 1, 2005, through December 31, 2011 (946 arrest cases logged in were for officers arrested during the year 2012). Prior to July 1, 2012, there were 6,693 police crime arrest cases (involving 5,752 individual sworn law enforcement officers) that had previously been logged in our database. Thus, during this reporting period we added 690 new police crime arrest cases and 565 more sworn officers to our database (including 195 new cases involving 122 individual officers who were arrested during the years 2005-2011). In sum, during this reporting period, we expanded our database of known police crime arrest cases by 13.1% overall (an increase of 3.1% for the study years 2005-2011 arrest cases).

We continue to make enhancements to our project database, which utilizes an enterprise-level content management system, OnBase. During the prior reporting period we designed and implemented a relational database that is now integrated with our digital imaging database within OnBase. We are now focusing on SPSS software integration with the project database. The integrated relational and digital imaging database includes electronic case log-in procedures and allows us to structure and search data in different ways for content analyses. During the first quarter of calendar year 2013 we will deploy a PC-based on-screen coding instrument using customized IBM/SPSS Data Collection/Data Entry Author/Interviewer modules that will also be integrated with our OnBase project relational and digital imaging database.

The digital imaging database includes 152,006 scanned pages of digital images, consisting of 13,182 TIFF case document files, 11,382 TIFF coding sheet document files, and 5,132 PDF PACER document files. Of these, 82,784 pages were added since July 1, 2012, consisting of 2,787 case document files and 1,680 coding sheet document files, and 5,132 PACER document files. The PACER files consisting of 69,841 pages were recently electronically imported into our OnBase project database and indexed using a customized automated document import processor.

In sum, our digital imaging database currently includes more than 152,000 pages of news articles, court records, and coding sheets that document the criminal arrests of more than 6,000 police officers since the beginning of 2005. These officers were employed in state, local, special, and tribal law enforcement agencies in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

We learned that training of graduate research assistants and the process of coding the content of case file records is more time-consuming and slower than we anticipated when we developed the project timeline. Crucial to timely completion of the project will be the implementation of our PC-based coding instrument that will replace our paper-based coding sheets as early as February 2013.

PROJECT GOALS:

There are three major goals of the project. The first goal of this research is to determine the nature and extent of police crime in the United States. The second goal is to determine what factors influence how a police organization responds to arrests of officers. The third and final goal of the research is to foster police integrity by exploring whether police crime and officer arrests correlate with other forms of police misconduct.

DISSEMINATION OF PROJECT RESULTS TO COMMUNITIES OF INTEREST:

Results have been disseminated to communities of interest through the writing and publication of refereed journal articles, magazine articles, and research briefs. We also maintain a project website and blog, and produce a monthly audio podcast that is available on iTunes.

We have proactively worked to disseminate our research results to communities of interest. To that end, we have engaged in outreach activities to reach members of communities who are not usually aware of these research activities, for the purpose of enhancing public understanding and increasing interest in learning and careers in criminological research. We have published two short research-brief articles reporting our research findings in Police Chief, a practitioner-oriented magazine published by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. We also make PDF copies of one-sheet research briefs explaining our research studies and findings on our web-site and post timely project-related entries on our blog. Additionally, we distribute audio podcasts on iTunes where we discuss the research project, studies, and related findings.

The web analytic reports for the Police Integrity Lost Blog indicate that for the time period July 1, 2012, through December 31, 2012, there were 1,054 unique visitors to the blog. Traffic to the blog was primarily from the United States (96.2%) where visitors to the blog were located in 152 cities across the country, but there were also visitors to the blog from India, Philippines, Australia, Canada, Algeria, Bangladesh, United Kingdom, and Poland. Traffic to the blog included direct traffic (73.53%), search traffic (17.17%), and referral traffic (9.3%).

The iTunes podcast is available domestically as well as internationally, and interested persons can stream, download, and/or subscribe to the podcast audio files directly from the iTunes client application. Web analytics for the iTunes podcast episodes indicates that for the period September 1, 2012, through December 31, 2012, there were 3,487 mp3 file hits, indicating that there were 3,487 instances when someone either streamed (listened to) all or part of one of our podcast episodes and/or downloaded mp3 audio files. Of those hits, the largest number of requests directed to our pod server to stream and/or download the mp3 audio files was in October 2012 when there were 1,363 hits on the Police Drug Corruption podcast (Police Integrity Lost Podcast Episode 1) and 1,426 hits on the Off-Duty Police Crime podcast (Police Integrity Lost Podcast Episode 3).

PLANS FOR NEXT REPORTING PERIOD TO ACCOMPLISH THE PROJECT GOALS:

We have added additional research staff to complete task 7 on the project timeline. The NIJ grant provides two 20-hour/week graduate research assistants. Additional staff research assistants are being assigned to the project staff at University expense as an in-kind contribution. Three additional 20-hour/week graduate assistants have been assigned to the project staff and are now being trained to code the content of the case files. At this time, we anticipate substantial completion of tasks 7-10 on the project timeline by the end of July 2013.

Currently, we are preparing three papers that will soon be submitted to refereed journals for publication consideration: Police Drunk Driving Arrests, Crime by School Resource Officers, and Crime by Policewomen. We will be presenting our findings on a study of Police Sexual Misconduct Arrests in a presentation at the annual conference of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences on March 21, 2013, in Dallas, Texas. Additionally, we have several speaking engagements in Ohio during January and February 2013 where we will discuss our research findings related to Officer-involved Domestic Violence.

We will continue to work on papers that we will submit to journals for publication consideration, and will also continue to produce our monthly audio podcast for iTunes. We have also started preliminary work on Task 12 on the project timeline, and are outlining and writing the introduction (including the literature review) and methods section for the final technical report.

PRODUCTS PRODUCED BY THE PROJECT:

The project has produced two peer-reviewed journal articles, two research brief magazine articles, four one-sheet research briefs, six mp3 audio podcast episodes, and five research presentations.

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.