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[GK86]

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The data set includes 8,006 arrest incidents resulting in 13,623 charges involving 6,596 police officers from 2005 through 2012, with more years of data to come. Nearly half these incidents, Stinson and his research team concluded, were violent.

The data covers 2,830 state, local, and special law enforcement agencies across all 50 states plus Washington, D.C. That’s just a fraction of the approximately 18,000 law enforcement agencies and 1.1 million sworn officers in the U.S., so the data set is not comprehensive, but it’s the most extensive and ambitious look at cop crime to date.

Stinson makes it clear that his database does not capture the full extent of crimes committed by U.S. police officers. First, it covers only eight years and more recent data hasn’t been fully coded yet (his team hopes to complete 2013 data by later this fall, with more years added after that).

Another reason is that not everyone who commits a crime gets caught — and many criminal incidents involving police officers, in particular, don’t end in an arrest or charges. In some departments, cops enjoy a certain amount of “professional courtesy” from their fellow officers, Stinson said — rather than arrest a colleague for driving drunk, an officer might look the other way, or even drive him home.

Since 2010, 49 student research assistants at Bowling Green have worked in Stinson’s research group, helping to code and shape the data. They gather the data on arrests primarily through media reports, which they find using 48 different Google alerts — variants of “police officer was arrested,” “detectives were indicted,” and “trooper was charged,” for example.

...
Lynch cautioned that Stinson’s Google alert system is a relatively new technology, and new technology can be flawed. “It’s a legitimate method,” he said, ”but it’s not foolproof.”

Onto the data:

1,219 officers were arrested for sex-related crimes from 2005 through 2012.

• More than half of the alleged victims were underage — 17 or younger.
• The most common sex crime was “forcible fondling” (388 cases), followed by “forcible rape” (355 cases).
• 17 percent of the officers arrested for sex crimes (213 cops total) were charged in multiple sex-related cases, meaning they were either repeat offenders or had multiple victims.

846 drug-related arrests occur in the data from 2005 through 2012.

• 227 of these involved more than one drug.
• The most common drugs involved in these cases were cocaine (251 charges), marijuana (202 charges), and the prescription opioid oxycodone (110 charges).
• Opioid-related charges increased from 2005 through 2012, but the sample size is small: There were just 11 arrests involving opioids in 2005, which grew to 55 by 2012, driven largely by the prescription painkillers hydrocodone and oxycodone.

Officers’ gender

• Most cops who got arrested — like most officers overall — were men: 93 percent, or 6,176 in total.
• 13 percent of the most serious charges male cops faced were for misdemeanor assault.
• Just 7 percent of arrested officers were women — 429 in total. The most serious charge female officers faced most often was drunk driving, accounting for roughly a fifth of all charges.

Repeat offenders

• Out of the 6,596 officers in the data set, 802 were arrested more than once. This could mean multiple arrests spread across many years, or it could mean a cop faced criminal charges relating to more than one victim stemming from a single arrest.
• Stinson’s team also found that nearly a quarter (24 percent) of the officers arrested for any crime from 2005 through 2011 were sued at some point during their career for federal civil rights violations, like excessive use of force or verbal harassment. These suits may have come before or after the officer was arrested and might be entirely unrelated, but they could also be a proxy for whether an arrested cop is just having a difficult moment or really is a bad apple. “This suggests to us that these are bad cops,” Stinson explained. “These aren’t just one-offs where they get in trouble.”

Convictions:

Out of 5,148 cases where Stinson and his team know the outcome, 3,716 (or nearly three-quarters) resulted in a conviction. But Stinson said this conviction rate might be misleading — especially when it comes to serious crimes.

A felony conviction, for example, would likely end a cop’s career because convicted felons typically lose their right to carry a gun. So an officer arrested on felony charges may plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge instead, in order to keep his gun — and his job.

Firings:

Stinson and his team track whether officers who are arrested lose their jobs, in addition to the outcomes of their cases. He knows that at least 91 percent of convicted offers were fired or resigned. The picture for all arrested officers is unclear — it seems they lost their jobs in a little over half of cases where Stinson was able to determine what happened.

“I always assumed that if an officer gets arrested, their career was over,” Stinson said. “What we’re seeing is that this is not the case. Many of these officers don’t get convicted, and many of them who actually leave their job, lose it, or quit, end up working as police officers elsewhere. So there’s a sort of officer shuffle that goes on.”

 

[Messofanego]

This is for the #notallcops audience. For everyone else, this just further confirms what we already knew about corrupt cops being protected by their own.

 

[Steeped in a Sea of Games]

The officers getting shuffled around reminds me of how the Catholic church tried to hide their pedophile priests by moving them to new parishes. Gives the local appearance of something happening, but allows the criminal to get off with minor consequences.

 

[Spring-Loaded]

The officers getting shuffled around reminds me of how the Catholic church tried to hide their pedophile priests by moving them to new parishes. Gives the local appearance of something happening, but allows the criminal to get off with minor consequences.

That's an apt, disturbing parallel.