Are NFL Arrestees Violent Specialists or High Frequency Offenders or Both?

ABSTRACT

Although recent research showed that NFL players have a higher violent crime arrest rate, it remains unclear whether, at the individual-level, NFL players who are arrested are specializing in violent crimes or whether their involvement in violence is driven largely by their high frequency of offending. Using two publically available databases on NFL player arrests, our results show that high frequency offending is rare among the arrested NFL players, that non-white players are more chronic than white players, and that the likelihood of violence is largely driven by high frequency offending—especially among non-white players. Importantly, there appears to be no specialization-in-violence among this sample of arrested NFL players.

Notes

¹ We provide some analyses on race because of the attention given to minority (mainly African-American) NFL players, including for example, Adam “Pacman” Jones and Michael Vick (see Tinsley 2015).

² We thank Gershon Tenenbaum for his suggestions on the sports psychology literature.

³ Recently, concerns have mounted over on-field NFL behavior with recent studies documenting the high prevalence of head injuries (Breslow 2015) and the adverse brain and health outcomes that have been identified (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sports/concussion-watch/new-87-deceased-nfl-players-test-positive-for-brain-disease/).

⁴ Recall that our analyses in this article use the sample of arrestees across the two databases and are not based on the full population of NFL players.

⁵ We also performed two additional logistic regression models predicting violence using arrest frequency, one for white players and one for non-white players. These models showed that while arrest frequency was not predictive of violence among white players, it was significantly and positively related to the likelihood of violence among non-white players.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wanda Leal

WANDA LEAL is a doctoral student in the College of Criminology & Criminal Justice at Florida State University. Her research interests include drug use and abuse, drug-related policies, life-course criminology, and sports and crime. Her recent publications have appeared in such journals as Crime & Delinquency and Journal of Criminal Justice.

Marc Gertz

MARC GERTZ is a Professor in the College of Criminology & Criminal Justice at Florida State University. His research interests include public opinion and the criminal justice system, politics and the courts, and comparative criminal justice systems. His recent publications have appeared in such journals as Crime & Delinquency, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, and Journal of Criminal Justice.

Alex R. Piquero

ALEX R. PIQUERO is Ashbel Smith Professor of Criminology and Associate Dean of Graduate Programs in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas. His research interests include criminal careers, criminological theory, and quantitative research methods. He has received several research, teaching, and service awards and is Fellow of both the American Society of Criminology and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. In 2014, he received The University of Texas System Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award.