Trigger Warning!
I am defensive of
law enforcement. Start messing with the
police and I get upset. Make wild
accusations about law enforcement and I really get upset. Distortion of the facts falls into the “wild
accusations” column.
However, when
criticism is justified, I’m all in. When
one of our own tarnishes his or her badge, my badge is also tarnished.
The left-leaning USA
Today story began with the following headline.
“We found 85,000 cops who’ve been investigated for misconduct. Now you can read their records.” (Story by John Kelly and Mark Nichols)
First of all, let’s
just get this out there. Personnel
records are supposed to be internal records and not available for public
review. It appears that this is no
longer the case. So, if police
confidential internal affairs records are subject to public review, you can
count on your private “confidential” personnel records being open to public
scrutiny some day. But this is not the
main issue here.
The article
explains that 85,000 police officers have been investigated or disciplined
for misconduct over the past decade.
We are talking about a ten-year period.
While the authors mention such things as drug dealing, theft, DWI, and
spousal abuse, they fail to mention that misconduct can also include violation
of department policies, rules, and procedures, all of which can lead to
discipline up to and including termination.
Their report goes
on to explain that they had uncovered another 200,000 acts of police misconduct
that included 110,000 internal affairs investigations resulting in 30,000
officers who were decertified in 44 states. That translates into 170,000 of reports of
misconduct that came up empty-handed and 80,000 internal affairs investigations
that didn’t result in officer termination.
On the surface,
these numbers paint a terrible picture of police in the United States. But let’s put these numbers into
perspective. Those 200,000 acts of
misconduct include not only crimes but also violations of department policies
and procedures and over a 10-year period.
Essentially, they are saying that there are 20,000 yearly acts of police
misconduct. In 2013 there were a total
of 15,388 state, local, and county law enforcement agencies across the country. (There are an additional 2,597 special
jurisdiction police agencies such as campus, railroad, housing authority, port
police.) This means that on average,
every police agency in the country had 1.3 officers engaged in police
misconduct each year (U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs,
Bureau of Justice Statistics, May 2015).
Another way of
looking at these statistics that the USA Today authors are putting out is to
look at the number of law enforcement officers in the United States and
stacking that number up against officer misconduct reports. There were 701,169 state, local, and county
law enforcement officers, not including the special jurisdiction police, in
2016 (BJS, 2015). Going on the average
of 20,000 reports of misconduct per year, this would amount to 2.85% of
officers being disciplined for misconduct each year. Throw in those additional special
jurisdiction numbers if you want and the numbers go down.
There are at least
two more factors that need to be considered as we look at the numbers of police
misconduct. One has to do with the
distribution of police officers across varying sized departments.
There are 83 police
departments across the country employing over 1,000 sworn officers. At the same time, there are 13,096 police
agencies employing 24 or fewer officers.
There are 2,125 agencies that employ only one (1) officer! (BJS, 2015).
It is a sad day indeed when 1.3 officers are disciplined for misconduct
in a police agency of one (1). In other
words, more police misconduct is going to take place in increasingly larger
agencies.
The second factor
to be considered is the attrition rate in law enforcement. Various studies have been conducted over the
years into this issue. The Vermont
Criminal Justice Center reports a 51% turnover rate in the first two years of
employment. North Carolina reports a 14%
turnover rate with new officers averaging a 33-month tenure. Perhaps the most comprehensive study on
police attrition, Koper, Maguire and Moore (2001) report that two-thirds of all
officers in small agencies and one-third of officers in large police agencies
resign within the first five years of employment.
These last two
factors alone confuse the narrative of a crooked law enforcement community.
Now, without a
doubt, there are hidden numbers related to misconduct. Some acts of misconduct go unreported. Other acts of misconduct are handled by
police agencies in a way that do not get included in the reports. And without a doubt, police should be held
accountable for misconduct. But when we
talk about police conduct, let’s at least be fair about it and put misconduct
into proper perspective. Especially in a
time when police departments across the country are begging for people to join
their ranks, we need to honesty in reporting.
And before the journalistic finger is pointed at law enforcement, perhaps
it would be good for the media to clean up its own act. Just exactly how many more media monsters (see,
I can use inflammatory language, too) are there out there like Roger Ailes, Harvey
Weinstein, Roy Price, James Toback, Mark Halperin, Kevin Spacey, Michael
Oreskes, Brett Ratner, Russell Simmons, C.K. Lewis, Jeffrey Tambor, Glenn
Thrush, Charlie Rose, John Lasseter, Matt Lauer, and the venerable Garrison
Keillor are out there?
Want to know why
there is friction between police and the media?
