To protect and collect: a nationwide study of profit-motivated police crime

ABSTRACT

This study is part of a larger research project on police crime in the United States. Police crimes are those criminal offenses committed by sworn law enforcement officers who have the general powers of arrest. Profit-motivated police crime involves officers who use their authority of position to engage in crime for personal gain. This study reports the findings on 1,591 cases where a law enforcement officer was arrested for one or more profit-motivated crimes during the seven-year period 2005–2011. The profit-motivated arrest cases involved 1,396 individual officers employed by 782 state, local, special, constable, and tribal law enforcement agencies located in 531 counties and independent cities in 47 states and the District of Columbia. Our data is the first systematic study of profit-motivated police crime. The study describes the nature of this form of police misconduct in terms of several dimensions, including the characteristics of police who perpetrate these crimes, where it occurs, the specific criminal charges, and the contexts within which profit-motivated police crime is punished through police agencies and the criminal courts.

KEYWORDS:

• Police crime
• police corruption
• police misconduct
• profit-motivated police crime

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Support was provided by the Wallace Action Fund of Tides Foundation [1710-48349,TRF15-03645,TRF16-03956]; This project was also supported by Award No. 2011-IJ-CX-0024, awarded by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Justice.

Notes on contributors

Philip Matthew Stinson

Philip Matthew Stinson, Sr., J.D., Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Criminal Justice Program at Bowling Green State University. His primary research interests include the study of police behaviors, including police crime, police corruption, and police misconduct. He is principal investigator in a longitudinal study of police crime across the United States funded by the Wallace Action Fund at Tides Foundation and, previously, funded by the National Institute of Justice. Dr. Stinson's recent publications include articles in Criminal Justice Policy Review, Sociology Compass, and Victims and Offenders.

John Liederbach

John Liederbach, Ph.D., is a professor in the Criminal Justice Program at Bowling Green State University. He is primarily a police scholar, and his research focuses on the study of police behavior across community types, racial profiling, the processing of citizen complaints, and police crime. He is co-author of Police Patrol Allocation and Deployment (Pearson). Dr. Liederbach also publishes in the area of white-collar crime and is co-author of Digital Crime/Digital Terrorism (Pearson). His research appears in a variety of journals including Justice Quarterly, Police Quarterly, and Criminal Justice Policy Review

Michael Buerger

Michael Buerger, Ph.D., is a professor in the Criminal Justice Program at Bowling Green State University. He was the on-site director for the Criminal Control Institute’s Minneapolis RECAP Experiment and the original Hot Spots of Crime Experiment, both funded by the National Institute of Justice. Dr. Buerger’s research has been published in numerous journals, including Criminology and Justice Quarterly

Steven L. Brewer

Steven L. Brewer, Jr., Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Administration of Justice Program at Penn State Shenango. His research focuses on methodologies relating to quantitative predictive analytic algorithms. Dr. Brewer’s research has been recently published in Journal of Crime and Justice, Children & Schools, and Criminal Justice Policy Review.