POLICE INTEGRITY LOST

A new research article Police Sexual Misconduct: Arrested Officers and their Victims has been prepublished online by the journal Victims & Offenders. Police sexual misconduct encompasses a range of acts from less serious noncriminal behaviors to more egregious criminal behaviors including police sexual violence. Victims of sex crimes are often reluctant to report sexual abuse when the offender is a police officer. The study provides empirical data on 771 sex-related arrest cases in years 2005-2008 of 555 sworn officers at 449 nonfederal law enforcement agencies across the United States. The study identifies and describes incidents where officers were arrested for sex crimes through a quantitative content analysis of published newspaper articles and court records. Findings focus on arrested officers and their victims. The co-authors of the article are Philip Stinson, Steven Brewer, Brooke Mathna, John Liederbach, and Christine Englebrecht.

On February 21, 2014, Phil Stinson and Steve Brewer presented a paper on the Victims of Police Sexual Misconduct at the 2014 annual conference of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The presentation is available on iTunes as this month’s episode of the Police Integrity Lost podcast.

Little is known about officers arrested for crimes related to police sexual misconduct and their victims. The study is a quantitative content analysis of news articles reporting 771 arrests of 555 police officers for sex-related crimes during the years 2005-2008. The arrested officers were employed by 449 nonfederal state, local, and special law enforcement agencies located in 349 counties and independent cities in 44 states and the District of Columbia. Multivariate analyses include logistic regression and classification tree regression models. Findings and policy implications are discussed, with an emphasis on the victims of police sexual misconduct.

School resource officers (SRO)s have become a permanent presence in many K-12 schools throughout the United States. As a result, an emerging body of research has focused on SROs, particularly on how SROs are viewed by students, teachers, and the general public. In this episode of the Police Integrity Lost podcast, Bowling Green State University professors Phil Stinson and Adam Watkins discuss their research recent research study on crime by SROs. This exploratory and descriptive research employs a different focus by examining the nature of crimes for which SROs were arrested in recent years with information gathered from online news sources. The current findings, which are discussed in this podcast episode, are encouraging insofar as they reveal that SROs are rarely arrested for criminal misconduct. When SROs are arrested, however, they are most often arrested for a sex-related offense involving a female adolescent. These sex-related incidents generally occurred away from school property or during nonschool hours at school and rarely involved the use of physical force. The implications of these findings for SRO programs are also discussed in the podcast. The Police Integrity Lost podcast is available on iTunes.

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.