Abstract
Policing has become a topic of intense public scrutiny and protest in the aftermath of several recent highly questionable and violent police–citizen encounters including the acts of police violence against George Floyd in Minneapolis (MN), Breonna Taylor in Louisville (KY), and Jacob Blake in Kenosha (WI). These encounters have led to large-scale street protests, the legitimization of the Black Lives Matter movement, and what many commentators perceive as a “national reckoning” on the issue of racial justice. The focus of our research is on police crime—a particular form of police misconduct that involves the criminal arrest of police officers. Our work is designed to identify cases in which law enforcement officers have been arrested for any type of criminal offense(s). One area of police scholarship that has thus far been neglected is the relationship between citizen race and the perpetration of police crime. We are aware of no existing empirical studies on whether, and if so, to what degree, citizen race is associated with crimes committed by police officers. The public has been forced to re-examine and question the role and legitimacy of police against the backdrop of protests and concerns about how police may contribute to racial injustice and discrimination. The broadest research issue involved an examination of the association between police crime and the race of the victim. Our goal was to identify and examine any racial disparities of police crime overall and within specific types of police crime. The analyses compared police crimes committed against Black victims to all other police crimes identified within the dataset. More specifically, we examined the degree to which police crimes perpetrated against Black victims tend to be more violent than those perpetrated against non-Black victims. CHAID regression models were utilized to explore any multivariate relationships between race and police crime. Data were derived from published news articles using the Google News search engine and its Google Alerts email update service. Our database currently includes information on more than 18,700 cases of police crime from years 2005–2021. The study utilized data derived from this larger project. The study examined those cases of police crime in which we have identified a victim and recorded information on the race of the victim. The dataset for this study includes information on 865 criminal arrest cases of sworn nonfederal law enforcement officers within the United States from 2005 through 2014.
Highlights
Racial disparities within the context of American policing have endured as an important topic within both the public policy agenda and criminal justice scholarship
Cases of nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers who were arrested on or between 1 January 2005 and 31 December 2014 were selected for the study where we were able to determine the victim race (N = 865)
Of these 685 officers who were arrested, 96 of the arrested officers had more than one case (X = 1.26, Mdn = 1.00, Mode = 1, SD = 1.002) because they had more than one crime victim and/or were arrested on more than one occasion while employed as a sworn law enforcement officer during the study years 2005–2014
Summary
Racial disparities within the context of American policing have endured as an important topic within both the public policy agenda and criminal justice scholarship. The focus on racial disparities echoed across nearly one-half century and the 1968 release of the report of the President’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (known as the Kerner Commission), an earlier federal task force that identified discriminatory policing and a flawed justice system as the root cause of more than 150 urban riots and disorders between 1965 and 1968 that resulted in more than USD 100 million in property losses and the deaths of dozens of citizens, the majority of them Black (George 2018; U.S National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders 1968) Both of these federal commissions—enacted five decades apart but focused largely on the same underlying problem—share contexts that are at once strikingly similar and disturbing. These encounters instigated large-scale public protests, promoted the legitimization of the Black Lives Matter movement, and forecast what some commentators describe as a national reckoning on racial disparities in policing (Altman 2020; McLaughlin 2020)
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