Police Misbehavior Research Articles

POLICE RECRUITMENT AND TRAINING: ASSESSING THE IMPACT ON OFFICER BEHAVIOR AND CITIZEN COMPLAINTS IN NIGERIA

This study examines the impact of police recruitment and training practices on officer behavior and citizen complaints in Nigeria, identifying significant deficiencies that contribute to misconduct and public distrust. The research explores how inadequate recruitment standards, political interference, and insufficient training on ethics and community policing have undermined the professionalism of the Nigeria Police Force (NPF). Using an exploratory approach, the study analyzes literature reviews and secondary data from academic and governmental sources, comparing Nigeria’s practices with successful reforms in other African nations. Research indicates that the lack of a centralized background check system and inadequate training contribute to pervasive police misbehavior, as seen during the "End SARS" protests. Comparative analysis highlights best practices from countries like South Africa and Rwanda, where community-oriented policing and rigorous recruitment standards have improved public trust. The study concludes that reforming recruitment and training processes is crucial to promoting accountability and restoring public confidence in law enforcement. Key recommendations include establishing a centralized recruitment database, revamping training programs, and strengthening oversight mechanisms.

Body-Worn Cameras and Settlements

Body-worn cameras (BWCs) have been widely adopted in the United States due to their perceived promise of reducing police misconduct through a deterrent or Hawthorne effect. Much of the available evidence indicates that BWCs reduce civilian complaints, use-of-force, and other police misbehavior. However, there is a tendency for existing research to study minor forms of misbehavior rather than serious misconduct. This study focuses on examining how settlements, a proxy of serious police misconduct, changed with BWC adoption and are an important outcome to study as they may correspond with financial and litigation burdens for police departments. This study uses panel data from 19 police departments over 10 years to assess how settlements changed post-BWC adoption. The results indicate BWC adoption is associated with a 40% reduction in police settlements and a 40% decrease in the median cost per settlement, and suggest BWCs may lead to less severe police misconduct over time.

Can Training Make Policing Fairer and More Effective?

Following a series of high-profile cases of police harassment and violence, police reform has become a growing national concern in the U.S. We evaluate one reform effort, training police to treat people more fairly in hot spots of crime. We find training significantly improves officer behavior and citizen perceptions of police misbehavior while reducing arrests and crime.

Police stops to reduce crime: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Police-initiated pedestrian stops have been one of the most widely used crime prevention tactics in modern policing. Proponents have long considered police stops to be an indispensable component of crime prevention efforts, with many holding them responsible for the significant reductions in violent crime observed across major US cities in recent decades. Critics, however, have taken issue with the overuse of pedestrian stops, linking them to worsening mental and physical health, attitudes toward the police, and elevated delinquent behavior for individuals directly subject to them. To date, there has been no systematic review or meta-analysis on the effects of these interventions on crime and individual-level outcomes. To synthesize the existing evaluation research regarding the impact of police-initiated pedestrian stops on crime and disorder, mental and physical health, individual attitudes toward the police, self-reported crime/delinquency, violence in police-citizen encounters, and police misbehavior. We used the Global Policing Database, a repository of all experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations of policing interventions conducted since 1950, to search for published and unpublished evaluations of pedestrian stop interventions through December of 2019. This overarching search was supplemented by additional searches of academic databases, gray literature sources, and correspondence with subject-matter experts to capture eligible studies through December 2021. Eligibility was limited to studies that included a treatment group of people or places experiencing pedestrian stops and a control group of people or places not experiencing pedestrian stops (or experiencing a lower dosage of pedestrian stops). Studies were required to use an experimental or quasi-experimental design and evaluate the intervention using an outcome of area-level crime and disorder, mental or physical health, individual or community-level attitudes toward the police, or self-reported crime/delinquency. We adopted standard methodological procedures expected by the Campbell Collaboration. Eligible studies were grouped by conceptually similar outcomes and then analyzed separately using random effects models with restricted maximum likelihood estimation. Treatment effects were represented using relative incident rate ratios, odds ratios, and Hedges' g effect sizes, depending on the unit of analysis and outcome measure. We also conducted sensitivity analyses for several outcome measures using robust variance estimation, with standard errors clustered by each unique study/sample. Risk of bias was assessed using items adapted from the Cochrane randomized and non-randomized risk of bias tools. Our systematic search strategies identified 40 eligible studies corresponding to 58 effect sizes across six outcome groupings, representing 90,904 people and 20,876 places. Police-initiated pedestrian stop interventions were associated with a statistically significant 13% (95% confidence interval [CI]: -16%, -9%, p < 0.001) reduction in crime for treatment areas relative to control areas. These interventions also led to a diffusion of crime control benefits, with a statistically significant 7% (95% CI: -9%, -4%, p < 0.001) reduction in crime for treatment displacement areas relative to control areas. However, pedestrian stops were also associated with a broad range of negative individual-level effects. Individuals experiencing police stops were associated with a statistically significant 46% (95% CI: 24%, 72%, p < 0.001) increase in the odds of a mental health issue and a 36% (95% CI: 14%, 62%, p < 0.001) increase in the odds of a physical health issue, relative to control. Individuals experiencing police stops also reported significantly more negative attitudes toward the police (g = -0.38, 95% CI: -0.59, -0.17, p < 0.001) and significantly higher levels of self-reported crime/delinquency (g = 0.30, 95% CI: 0.12, 0.48, p < 0.001), equating to changes of 18.6% and 15%, respectively. No eligible studies were identified measuring violence in police-citizen encounters or officer misbehavior. While eligible studies were often considered to be at moderate to high risk of bias toward control groups, no significant differences based on methodological rigor were observed. Moderator analyses also indicated that the negative individual-level effects of pedestrian stops may be more pronounced for youth, and that significant differences in effect sizes may exist between US and European studies. However, these moderator analyses were limited by a small number of studies in each comparison, and we were unable to compare the effects of police stops across racial groupings. While our findings point to favorable effects of pedestrian stop interventions on place-based crime and displacement outcomes, evidence of negative individual-level effects makes it difficult to recommend the use of these tactics over alternative policing interventions. Recent systematic reviews of hot spots policing and problem-oriented policing approaches indicate a more robust evidence-base and generally larger crime reduction effects than those presented here, often without the associated backfire effects on individual health, attitudes, and behavior. Future research should examine whether police agencies can mitigate the negative effects of pedestrian stops through a focus on officer behavior during these encounters.

Citizen Complaints as an Accountability Mechanism: Uncovering Patterns Using Topic Modeling

ObjectivesCitizen complaints are considered by policing researchers as an indicator of police misconduct, and a proxy of police-community relations. Nevertheless, US and EU-based studies tend to focus on sustained complaints as reported by official agencies and officer-based correlates. Using the case of Carabineros, the Chilean militarized police force, this study examines (a) latent topics contained in a large set of complaints against the police on a digital platform, and (b) the change of those topics across time and (c) by complainants’ educational level.MethodsWe use novel computational natural language processing techniques to identify latent themes across the corpus of complaints ( N = 1,623), hosted on an online forum from 2013 to 2020.ResultsOur findings show eight latent themes across the corpus. Among others, these themes were related to police effectiveness, police misbehavior, and a master frame of institutional crisis that has significantly grown over the last year. Additionally, differences in the prevalence of topics by complainants’ educational level were also found.ConclusionsOur findings contribute to the enterprise of opening the black box of complaints against the police and highlighting opportunities for social accountability in a developing country.

PROTOCOL: Police stops to reduce crime: A systematic review.

PROTOCOL: Police stops to reduce crime: A systematic review.

Perceptions of Incarcerated Youth About Police Violence and Legitimacy in Trinidad and Tobago

This study was focused on the youth’s perceptions in Trinidad and Tobago, a developing Caribbean nation. It describes their personal experiences with and perceptions of police misbehavior or excessive use of force on juveniles and young adults held in the two reformatory institutions, as well as in the country’s only juvenile facility. The main objective of the present empirical research was to explore the diachronic conceptual relationship between violence and the levels of police legitimacy as perceived or experienced by the youth from 13 to 23 years old. Short questionnaires were used to capture the youth’s opinions on institutional violence, a distinct and long-lasting phenomenon in the region. Multivariate analyses of the quantitative data also examined the role of trust as an influencing factor for police legitimacy (and legitimation), being previously evaluated in terms of efficiency and equality. Although most of the research participants had a bad impression about the police, overall, whether the police operations were efficient or their procedures fair had no impact or influence on the particular sample’s levels of trust and general perceptions of the TTPS. Finally, recommendations on changes in the police’s administrative procedures were made along with a shift in organizational culture, and the promotion of community policing.

The code of silence and female police officers in Slovenia

Purpose – For some time now, research conducted in the field of human behavior and criminology has pertained to the contemporary question as to whether there are any relevant differences between the genders regarding their integrity and opinions held and, if so, which of these lead to different behaviors. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether there are any gender differences in willingness to report police misconduct and if so, what is the nature of these differences. Design/methodology/approach – In spring 2011, the study was conducted on a representative sample of 408 frontline Slovenian police officers (87.3 percent were male and 12.7 percent were female). The assessment of the code of silence was conducted using the method developed by Klockars and Kutnjak Ivković (2004), and consisted of 14 hypothetical scenarios describing a range of various forms of police misconduct, from those that merely give the appearance of a conflict of interest, to incidents of bribery and theft. One of the questions explored in relation to the police code of silence was the police officer’s willingness to report misconduct. Findings – Authors discovered significant differences in 11 of the 14 analyzed cases on the willingness to report police misconduct. Interestingly, female police officers were less willing than their male colleagues to report different forms of police misconduct. Female police officers are less willing to report police corruption in seven cases e.g. shooting runaway suspect, supervisor abusing his/her power, excessive force – punching a suspect, falsification of evidence, supervisor not prevent beating a suspect, police officer take bribes, and doing nothing when juveniles paint graffiti. The results were further analyzed from the group dynamic in Slovenian police point of view. The survey findings could be useful for police chiefs, leaders, and managers who want to achieve the main objective of every modern police organization: to prevent corruption and increase social responsibility. Originality/value – The study analyzes, comprehensively and originally, whether the female police officers differ from their male colleagues in the level of police integrity and willingness to report the cases of police corruption and/or other forms of police misbehavior.

Resident perceptions of police mistreatment and use of force in a troubled Trinidadian neighborhood

This study examines public perceptions of police mistreatment and use of force in a disadvantaged neighborhood in a developing Caribbean nation. This research describes residents’ perceptions of, and experiences with, police misbehavior before and after the implementation of a community-oriented policing initiative. Multivariate analyses examine whether the factors influencing perceptions of police use of excessive force varied across time. The initial results suggest that the introduction of community policing did not positively influence citizens’ views of, or experiences with, police mistreatment in this neighborhood. Results from the multivariate analyses suggest that the factors predicting public views about the frequency of excessive use of force by police did change over time. We offer several explanations for why change in residents’ views of police misbehavior did and did not occur.

Mapp v. Ohio’s Unsung Hero: Suppression Hearings as Morality Play

The exclusionary rule is back under the judicial magnifying glass. Recent opinions, most notably by Justice Scalia, have sparked speculation that the Roberts Court is inclined to overrule Mapp v. Ohio and send Fourth Amendment disputes back to the realm of civil suits and police disciplinary actions. As the Court’s rulings have made clear, any reevaluation of the exclusionary rule’s future will be conducted under the now familiar rubric of whether the rule’s “benefit” of deterring police misbehavior outweighs the “cost” of lost evidence and convictions. This essay argues that if any such reevaluation does occur, the Court must take into account something overlooked in evaluations of the past: the benefits of a suppression hearing itself. The hearing acts much like a morality play for those involved in the nitty gritty of law enforcement – police, judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys – by instructing everyone involved both as to the Fourth Amendment’s rules and why those rules are of a constitutional magnitude mandating honor and respect. And because the exclusionary rule reaches a wide variety of police behavior – unlike civil suits and disciplinary proceedings which reach only the most egregious instances of misbehavior – the suppression hearing becomes an invaluable public forum for providing transparency and promoting police compliance with the Fourth Amendment. In short, the suppression hearing is the exclusionary rule’s unsung hero, and in the end offers the Court a means to find the truest measure of the exclusionary rule’s costs and benefits.

The Strong Arm of the Law? Police Corruption in Ptolemaic Egypt

Given the broad powers granted its officers, the Ptolemaic law enforcement system ought to have been plagued by official abuses. Yet there are few indications that police misbehavior was a serious problem. Villagers complained about police misbehavior, but many complaints are suspect, highlighting "abuses" that look like proper procedure, and the fact that such complaints were often sent to police officials suggests that people trusted them. Insubordination in the ranks seems to have been uncommon; reprimands to subordinates from police administrators are few; and government circulars and decrees concerning corruption are often too vague to provide firm conclusions about the extent or even the types of police wrongdoing.

Police Solidarity and Tolerance for Police Misbehavior, Revisited

A small scale replication of Lester and Brink's (1985) study of police misbehavior was recently conducted with a sample of 125 police officers from Southern California. The findings of this study were diametrically opposed to those of Lester and Brink's findings. This study indicates that there does not appear to be a relationship between peer association while off duty and a proclivity for official misconduct. Several reasons are mentioned for possible explanation of the different findings.

Applying social learning theory to police misconduct

Although numerous studies have attempted to understand the causes of various forms of police misconduct, there is still no clear theoretical explanation of police misbehavior. Akers’ social learning theory posits that peer associations, attitudes, reinforcement, and modeling are predictors of delinquency and crime in general. With this article, we seek to determine if the theory can account for police deviance. Data from a random sample of Philadelphia police officers are used to examine how officer attitudes and perceptions of peer behavior are related to citizen complaints of police misconduct. Findings suggest that social learning theory provides a useful explanation of police misconduct.

Terrorism, Federalism, and Police Misconduct

Criminal law enforcement in the United States is overwhelmingly local - the large majority of police and prosecutors work for local governments, the large majority of arrests are made by local police, the overwhelming majority of criminal prosecutions are brought by local district attorneys' offices, and the great bulk of prisoners are in their cells as a result of those local prosecutions. The states do very little policing and almost no prosecution. And while the federal government does more in this sphere, it is still very much a backstop. This essay explores two questions: How does that allocation of law enforcement power affect the level of police misconduct in the United States? And how will the war on terrorism change both the allocation and the amount of police misbehavior? In brief, my answers to those questions are: In a system like ours, federal police - chiefly the FBI - may present more serious misconduct problems than do local police, because the FBI is neither politically accountable nor tightly constrained by limited resources. (Local police are both accountable and resource-constrained.) The war on terrorism may change that conclusion, by increasing not only the FBI's power, but also its level of accountability and constraint.

Police Solidarity and Tolerance for Police Misbehavior

Police Solidarity and Tolerance for Police Misbehavior