POLICE INTEGRITY LOST

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.