The results of an amazing new study conducted by Bowling Green State University were recently released. What they reveal is quite surprising. According to the study, a full 40 percent of the police officers who break the law, do so while on duty.
The study, which is the first of it’s kind to study criminal offenses by police officers, released their results only a week ago. Funded by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, the purpose had been to determine “the nature and extent of police crime” in the United States, “what factors influence how an agency responds to arrests of its officers,” and finally, what can be done about this in the future.
The study aimed to create a database that tracked police crime. As the researchers explained in their abstract, “There are no comprehensive statistics available on problems with police integrity, and no government entity collects data on all criminal arrests of law enforcement officers in the United States.”
By looking at a total of 6,724 instances where police officers were charged with a crime over a span of six years, the researchers were able to come up with some interesting facts. First, there appears to be no particular rhyme or reason to the type of crimes committed by police officers. Drunk or drugged driving, and physical or sexual assault were the most common offenses.
Some officers had been arrested multiple times
Of those cases the researchers looked at, a total of 5,545 cops were involved, from over 2,500 nonfederal law enforcement agencies across the nation. If the numbers sound like they’re not adding up, don’t worry – we wondered about that too. It turns out the reason there were more cases of arrests than there were involved officers, is because some officers had been arrested multiple times, or were involved in multiple cases which stemmed from a single arrest.
With regard to the issue of single officers being arrested on a number of occasions, this stems from the fact that union protections and settlement agreements sometimes forbid a police chief from including information about arrests and charges in a police officer’s personnel file. That officer then leaves a department and simply hires in at another department, where they commit the same crimes again.
This essentially corroborated information released in a separate, unrelated study, conducted by Illinois State University in 2013. This study showed that between 1996 and 2006, 40 percent of sexual assault cases involving a police officer were committed by officers who had already been accused of similar crimes in a prior instance.
For those of you who are curious about where Michigan falls with regard to our police officers, we can tell you this. Of the 6,724 arrests, 127 involved Michigan officers, which statistically, means that Michigan officers have considerable more integrity than officers in some other states. Something to be grateful for indeed. As Michael Jackson told us many years ago, “One bad apple don’t spoil the whole bunch.” Most cops are hard working, honest people. They are to be commended for their dangerous work. It’s the bad cops that we have to worry about.