An Exploration of Recidivism and the Officer Shuffle in Police Sexual Violence

Criminal Justice Studies

Liederbach

Buerger

et al. 2018

This study is part of a larger research project on police crime in the United States. Police crimes are those criminal offenses committed by sworn law enforcement officers who have the general powers of arrest. Profit-motivated police crime involves officers who use their authority of position to engage in crime for personal gain. This study reports the findings on 1,591 cases where a law enforcement officer was arrested for one or more profit-motivated crimes during the seven-year period 2005-2011. The profit-motivated arrest cases involved 1,396 individual officers employed by 782 state, local, special, constable, and tribal law enforcement agencies located in 531 counties and independent cities in 47 states and the District of Columbia. Our data is the first systematic study of profit-motivated police crime. The study describes the nature of this form of police misconduct in terms of several dimensions, including the characteristics of police who perpetrate these crimes, where it occurs, the specific criminal charges, and the contexts within which profit-motivated police crime is punished through police agencies and the criminal courts.

Section: Strengths and Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

To protect and collect: a nationwide study of profit-motivated police crime

Criminal Justice Studies

Liederbach

Buerger

et al. 2018

“…Rabe‐Hemp and Braithwaite () published a study focused on police sexual violence and the problem of officer shuffle, wherein police involved in various forms of sexual misconduct and crime escape punishment and maintain their law enforcement career through employment with another police agency. Data were derived through a content analysis of published newspaper accounts of police sexual violence from 1996 to 2000.…”

Section: Sex‐related Police Crimementioning

confidence: 99%

Police Crime: The Criminal Behavior of Sworn Law Enforcement Officers

2015

Sociology Compass

This essay examines the criminological conceptualizations and research on police crime, that is, the criminal behavior of sworn law enforcement officers. It starts with an overview of the conceptualization of police crime as it relates to organizational and scholarly perspectives of social deviance. Police deviance is often conceptualized to include various misconduct, corruption, and/or crime committed by police organizations and police officers. This essay focuses on police crime resulting in the arrest of a sworn law enforcement officer and is organized within a conceptual framework that incorporates five types of police crime: sex-related police crime, alcohol-related police crime, drug-related police crime, violence-related police crime, and profit-motivated police crime.

“…Research also suggests that police agencies are not especially effective at controlling media accounts of officer misconduct (Chermak, McGarrell, & Gruenewald, 2006). Despite the noted limitations, the use of news articles as the primary data source is a long established method of analyzing deviant/illegal police behavior (see, for example, Lawrence, 2000; Lersch & Feagin, 1996; Rabe-Hemp & Braithwaite, 2013; J. I. Ross, 2000).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Federal Civil Rights Litigation Pursuant to 42 U.S.C. §1983 as a Correlate of Police Crime

Criminal Justice Policy Review

Brewer

2016

The Civil Rights Act of 1871 (codified at 42 U.S.C. §1983 and commonly referred to as Section 1983) provides a civil remedy for aggrieved persons to sue state actors who under the color of law violate federally protected rights. Since the 1960s, there has been an explosion of Section 1983 litigation in the federal courts against police officers and their employing municipal and county agencies. Due to a lack of official statistics and poor methodologies, research has yet to determine how common Section 1983 actions are against the police nationwide. This study examines the relationship between police crime and being named as a party defendant in a federal court Section 1983 civil action. Using a list of 5,545 nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers who were arrested for committing one or more crimes during the years 2005 to 2011, searches were conducted in the federal courts’ Public Access to Courts Electronic Records (PACER) system to locate Section 1983 actions against those officers. The authors found that 22% of all arrested officers were named as a party defendant in a Section 1983 federal court civil action at some point during their law enforcement careers. Additional findings address various predictors of a police officer being sued in a Section 1983 action.