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.

The December 2012 episode of the Police Integrity Lost podcast is Crime by Policewomen: Is it Different than Crime by Policemen? It is available exclusively on iTunes. In this episode, Phil Stinson and Natalie Todak discuss their recent research study that explored criminal conduct by policewomen at various nonfederal law enforcement agencies across the United States. The information is increasingly relevant as departments hire more female officers, especially if their crimes are different than crimes by male officers. Using the Google News search engine and Google Alerts, the research team identified 105 cases depicting arrests of policewomen and a content analysis was performed. Findings reveal that female police crime is most often profit-motivated. Compared to arrested male officers, policewomen had fewer years of service and lower ranks, committed less violent crimes, and were more likely to receive suspensions for off-duty crimes. The findings suggest that differences exist between crimes committed by male and female officers. Phil Stinson is on the faculty at Bowling Green State University, and Natalie Todak is a doctoral student at Arizona State University.

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.

In this episode of the Police Integrity Lost podcast, Phil Stinson and John Liederbach discuss their recent research article on off-duty police crime. The off-duty misbehavior of police is an important concern for police agencies exposed to potential liability costs, and scholars engaged in debates about whether studies on police deviance should include acts committed while an officer is technically off duty. The problem for scholars interested in understanding off-duty police misconduct is that virtually all of the existing data describes the misbehavior of NYPD police. The purpose of the study is to explore the nature and character of off-duty police crime in the United States through a content analysis of news articles on arrested off-duty police officers.

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.