Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Bad Cops & Prosecutors Blogs -> Injustice in Seattle

Bad Cops & Prosecutors

: Injustice in Seattle

National Police Misconduct Reporting Project - April 2009 Statistics

By David Packman

With March clearly being a test run for the National Police Misconduct News Feed, April should be considered as our first month at this effort to gather information on all reported instances and alleged instances of police misconduct in the US.

Now that all of the reports in April have been recorded, I've distilled the data and the results are as follows:

General Statistics
495 - Reported instances and alleged instances of police misconduct.
16.5 - Reported instances and alleged instances per day on average.
$9,144,000 - Dollars paid out through civil settlements and judgments.

US Police Misconduct Density Map

Top 10 Worst States
1. CA 49
2. NY 43
3. FL 37
4. TX 32
5. PA 28
6. IL 21
6. MI 21
7. LA 16
8. AZ 14
8. GA 14
8. WA 14
9. OH 13
10. MD 12
10. NJ 12
10. TN 12

Top 10 Worst Cities
1. New York, NY - 11
2. Philadelphia, PA - 10
3. Chicago, IL - 8
3. Dallas, TX - 8
5. Baltimore, MD - 6
5. Los Angeles, CA - 6
5. Minneapolis, MN - 6
8. Orange County, CA - 5
9. Spokane, WA - 4
9. Denver, CO - 4
9. Detroit, MI - 4
9. Greece, NY - 4
9. Oakland, CA - 4

Police Misconduct by Type
Brutality 96
Sexual 60 (of which, 18 involved minors)
Theft 44
Shooting 40
DV 35
Color of Law 32
DUI 27
Wrong Arrest 20
Assault 16
Drugs 13
Racism 11
Perjury 8
Mistaken Raids 4
Animal Cruelty 3
Other 75
Unspecified 4

Misconduct Case Status/Outcomes

Terminology
Misconduct Types:
Assault - Physical violence occurring while off-duty
Brutality - Physical violence occurring while on-duty
Sexual - Sex related incidents including rape, sexual assault, harassment, coercion, prostitution, sex on duty, incest, and molestation.
Theft - includes robbery, theft, shoplifting, fraud, extortion, and bribery
Shooting - gun-related incidents both on and off-duty, including self-harm
Color of Law - incidents that involve misuse of authority
Perjury - includes false testimony, dishonesty during investigations, falsified charging papers, and falsified warrants.

Misconduct Status/Outcomes:
Allegation - First stage of a misconduct complaint, can be from victim, witnesses, relatives of the victim, and other sources. Simply an allegation of misconduct.

Investigation - Second stage of a misconduct complaint, can be an internal investigation, criminal investigation, external investigation, or a DOJ/FBI civil rights investigation.

Lawsuits - Civil complaints filed in court, generally requires more evidence than a simple allegation, but still within the realm of allegations.

Charges - Criminal complaints filed in court, generally requires more evidence than a simple allegation, but still within the realm of allegations.

Trials - Criminal trials in court, requires enough evidence to establish probable cause, higher threshold than civil litigation or criminal charges, but still allegations.

Judgments - These are rulings that support a civil litigation complaint but also include settlement agreements that are typically, officially, said to not be admissions of guilt. Should be considered a confirmed case of misconduct.

Disciplinary - Results of investigations that confirm misconduct complaints but do not result in termination of employment.

Firings - Results of investigations that confirm misconduct severe enough to warrant termination of employment.

Convictions - Results of criminal trials that confirm allegations serious enough to warrant criminal charges. These include both rulings and guilty pleas.

Methodology
Information Gathering:
Data is gathered from various media outlets by manual searches and review of daily news stories several times a day. There are no sufficient key terms that work well enough to automate this data gathering tasks, the results must be vetted by human intervention.

Information Storage:
Confirmed stories about police misconduct that have been vetted to ensure that the story is about a case of misconduct or allegation of misconduct are published to a Twitter-based National Police Misconduct NewsFeed. From there, the stories are copied to a spreadsheet where they can later be sorted and analyzed.

Data Analysis:
At the first day of the month, data from the previous month is sorted and analyzed in the spreadsheet. All duplicate stories, stories that are informational, stories involving policy, and legislative issues are purged from the spreadsheet. Any items involving a status change about a specific incident are culled so that only the latest status story remains to avoid duplicate data.

Data Presentation:
After all data has been analyzed it is presented on this site by General, Geographical, Type, and Status datasets.

Important Notes:
The data collected and presented here should only be used to provide a very basic and general view of the extent of police misconduct within the US. It is, by no means, an accurate guage that truly represents the exact extent of police misconduct since it relies on the information voluntarily gathered and/or released to the media, not from information gathered first-hand by independent monitors who investigate complaints of misconduct since no such agency exists nationally.

This information has been gathered here because nobody else is gathering it and the national government has not gathered it for several years. Keep in mind that geographical distribution of misconduct reports can be representative of concentrations of corruption or permissive attitudes towards abusive police policies or can be indications of more open information sharing between police agencies and local media along with departmental efforts to reduce misconduct by actively engaging problematic officers. There is no real way to determine which is the case since there is no independent monitoring and investigation into allegations of police misconduct.

For these reasons, this information should not be considered scientific or used for research since there are so many variables involved. The information shown here should only be considered informational in nature.

As always, I appreciate any recommendations, advice, requests, and general comments.

Thank you.

Full post as published by Injustice in Seattle on May 01, 2009 (boomark / email).