An Ex-Cop Keeps The Country’s Best Data Set On Police Misconduct

[swag]

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/an-ex-cop-keeps-the-countrys-best-data-set-on-police-misconduct/


By Carl Bialik


When Talking Points Memo, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post needed data on how often police officers are charged with on-duty killings, they all turned to the same guy: Bowling Green State University criminologist Philip M. Stinson.

Stinson, 50, has become an indispensable source for researchers and reporters looking into alleged crimes and acts of violence by police officers because he has built a database tracking thousands of incidents in which officers were arrested since 2005. His data has shown that even the few police officers who are arrested for drunken driving are rarely convicted and that arrests spike for cops who have been on the force 18 years or longer, contrary to prior research showing it was mostly new officers who were acting out.

The whole data-collecting operation is powered by 48 Google Alerts that Stinson set up in 2005, along with individual Google Alerts for each of nearly 6,000 arrests of officers. He has set up 10 Gmail addresses to collect all the alert emails, which feed articles into a database that also contains court records and videos.

It all adds up to a data set of alleged police misconduct unmatched by anything created inside or outside of government, which itself often uses Google Alerts to catch these cases.1 Yet Stinson’s database inevitably has holes because it relies on the media to cover every officer arrest, and because it takes immense effort to code each entry. The data set keeps falling behind.

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[underpants]

1. Interesting

Thanks

[Scuba]

2. Very telling that the federal government does not track this information.

[d_legendary1]

3. Mostly cause they don't want their foot soldier's tracks

ending up in the news. Could you imagine what would happen if they ever caught FBI agents running a drug cartel or worse?

[1Greensix]

4. Get out of jail free

Every department in the country gives officers cards, to give their family members to use to get out of tickets and arrests. They all have them and they all use them extensively. Have you heard of a parent, child, or spouse of a police officer getting a ticket. I'll bet not. They also have blocks on their driver's license to stop anyone from knowing their particulars, or addresses. The police call it 'professional courtesy", but it's organized "crime" when an officer or their family is excused from paying for a crime just because someone they are related to is a cop.
This has been going on for generations and it needs to stop!