By Simon A. Cole and Juan R. Sandoval

Police misconduct represents a profound societal issue with far-reaching consequences. Its detrimental effects encompass the discriminatory application of laws, harassment, physical violence and murder, corruption, wrongful arrests and wrongful convictions.1 These concerns are particularly pressing for underserved communities of color, where heightened levels of police contact and incarceration have effectively eroded the legitimacy of law enforcement.2 While police misconduct has been a long-standing concern, it has garnered heightened attention in recent years, primarily fueled by extensive media coverage of egregious acts of police violence, such as the killings of Michael Brown, George Floyd, and Tyre Nichols. An important recent concern about police violence has been the problem of “repeat offenders”— instances of police misconduct are not isolated events but rather involve particular officers who engage in misconduct repeatedly, with impunity. Discussion of this issue has focused on two key aspects: first, the existence of officers with extensive histories of misconduct that are often concealed from criminal defendants, judges, reporters, and the public; and second, the phenomenon of the “wandering officer” who commits misconduct in a particular department, is fired or leaves that police force, and then is hired by another police department in a different jurisdiction, where stakeholders are unaware of that officer’s history.3 The first issue came to light when it was revealed that in certain jurisdictions, including Los Angeles County and Baltimore, prosecutors maintained undisclosed “do not call” lists of police officers who should not be presented as witnesses in criminal trials due to their known histories of misconduct, perjury, or both. 4 The second problem came to light through the exposure of several infamous cases in which police officers effectively erased records of serious misconduct, secured  more widely accessible to stakeholders. This type of information has historically enjoyed legal protection, making it challenging for the public to access in numerous states.6 Notable disclosure efforts include the Invisible Institute’s publication of Chicago police misconduct data on a dedicated website, 7 and the New York Legal Aid Society's creation of a mobile device “app” designed for recording and accessing public information about individual police officers, which subsequently gained national traction through the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.8 Finally, there have been persistent lobbying efforts aimed at persuading legislators to increase the transparency of information related to police misconduct for the general public. In California, these lobbying efforts have succeeded. In 2019, the legislature enacted new laws transforming the state from one that “without question, had the worst laws governing the disclosure of adjudicated findings of police misconduct” to one with “some of the strongest transparency laws” in the U.S.9 A consortium of stakeholders, including academic institutions, civil rights organizations, journalists, public defenders, and innocence organizations (including the National Registry of Exonerations), has formed the California Law Enforcement Accountability Network (CLEAN) to coordinate efforts of gathering, archiving, analyzing, and making public this newly accessible data.10 This report seeks to support these initiatives by exploring possible uses of information from the National Registry of Exonerations. This online publicly accessible archive contains data and narratives about all known exoneration cases in United States history. Police misconduct is important to the Registry because it is widely recognized as one of the key contributors to wrongful convictions in the United States. Police misconduct contributed to 43% of the wrongful convictions that resulted in exonerations since 1989.11 In addition, the Registry tracks clusters of exonerations through its Groups Registry. This includes exonerations centered around notorious rogue officers, such as former sheriff's deputy Tom Coleman in Tulia, Texas, former Sergeant Ronald Watts in Chicago, and Rafael Perez, the former Los Angeles Police detective at the heart of the Rampart scandal.   

 Ann Arbor: National Registry of Exonerations, 2023. 13p.

By Max Schanzenbach

Police misconduct is at the top of the public policy agenda, but there is surprisingly little understanding of how police personnel management policies affect police misconduct. Police-civilian interactions in large jurisdictions are, in principle at least, highly regulated. But these regulations are at least partially counteracted by union contracts and civil service regulations that constrain discipline and other personnel decisions, thereby limiting a city’s ability to manage its police force. This Essay analyzes police personnel management by bringing forth evidence from a variety of data sources on police personnel practices as well as integrating an existing, but relatively siloed, literature on police misconduct. The empirical findings that emerge are as follows: (1) policing is a surprisingly secure, well-paid job with little turnover prior to retirement age; (2) inexperienced police officers are, all else equal, more likely to commit misconduct and, at the same time, more likely to receive high risk assignments; and (3) bad cops are a serious problem, are identifiable, and are rarely removed or disciplined. Taken together, these facts suggest that attempts to regulate police conduct directly or through civil rights litigation are impeded by the inability of those who supervise police to control individual officers through assignments, discipline, and removal. The nexus of compensation, seniority, promotion, discipline, and pension policies that characterize much police personnel management cannot be rationalized under traditional labor and employment contract analysis. Existing compensation  and pension policies could be rationalized, however, if supervisors were empowered to manage police through assignments, penalties, and promotion.

Chicago: Vanderbilt Law Review, 2022, 49p.  

Ben Grunwald and John Rappaport

“Wandering officers” are law-enforcement officers fired by one department, sometimes for serious misconduct, who then find work at another agency. Policing experts hold disparate views about the extent and character of the wandering-officer phenomenon. Some insist that wandering officers are everywhere—possibly increasingly so—and that they’re dangerous. Others, however, maintain that critics cherry-pick rare and egregious anecdotes that distort broader realities. In the absence of systematic data, we simply do not know how common wandering officers are or how much of a threat they pose, nor can we know whether and how to address the issue through policy reform.

In this Article, we conduct the first systematic investigation of wandering officers and possibly the largest quantitative study of police misconduct of any kind. We introduce a novel data set of all 98,000 full-time law-enforcement officers employed by almost 500 different agencies in the State of Florida over a thirty-year period. We report three principal findings. First, in any given year during our study, an average of just under 1,100 officers who were previously fired—three percent of all officers in the State—worked for Florida agencies. Second, officers who were fired from their last job seem to face difficulty finding work. When they do, it takes them a long time, and they tend to move to smaller agencies with fewer resources in areas with slightly larger communities of color. Interestingly, though, this pattern does not hold for officers who were fired earlier in their careers. Third, wandering officers are more likely than both officers hired as rookies and those hired as veterans who have never been fired to be fired from their next job or to receive a complaint for a “moral character violation.” Although we cannot determine the precise reasons for the firings, these results suggest that wandering officers may pose serious risks, particularly given how difficult it is to fire a police officer. We consider several plausible explanations for why departments nonetheless hire wandering officers and suggest potential policy responses to each.

129 Yale Law Journal 1676-1782 (2020)

By 21CP Solutions.

From the Introduction: The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing was established by Executive Order under then President Barack Obama on December 18, 2014. President Obama charged the task force with identi- fying best practices and offering recommendations on how policing practices can promote effective crime reduction while building public trust. Since the publication of the task force’s final report in May 2015, there have been more than 133 national, state, or local task forces, councils, and working groups responding to police violence in communities throughout the country.1

The nation remains in a policing crisis, and too many poor communities of color face the adverse conditions of poverty and economic exclusion that aggravate the relationship between communities and police. The 2015 report by the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing remains a significant influence on policing reform, but the country still confronts police violence that undermines community trust and confidence.

Task Force on 21st Century Policing: A Renewed Call to Action. Chicago: 21CP Solutions, LLC. 2023. 40p.

U.S. President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice

The analysis focused on the police role and responsibilities; police organization, management, and operations; the coordination and consolidation of police service; police personnel selection, training, and career development; police-community relations; police ethics; the implementation of policing standards through State commission on police standards; and the community's role in law enforcement. Individual sections detailed the history of the police, police attitudes toward their role, internal and external controls, police leadership, the use of technology, police misconduct, the role of private police, citizen crime precautions, and community crime prevention planning.

Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, 1967. 250p.

By Bocar A. Ba and Roman G. Rivera

Does policing the police increase crime? We avoid simultaneity effects of increased public oversight during a major scandal by identifying events in Chicago that only impacted officers’ self-imposed monitoring. We estimate crime’s response to self- and public-monitoring using regression discontinuity and generalized synthetic control methods. Self-monitoring, triggered by police union memos, significantly reduced serious complaints without impacting crime or effort. However, after a scandal, both civilian complaints and crime rates rise, suggesting that higher crime rates following heightened oversight results from de-policing and civilian behavior simultaneously changing. Our research suggests that proactive internal accountability improves police-community relations without increasing crime.

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, 2019. 89p.