Police Misconduct

Police misconduct refers to improper conduct carried out by police officers in the line of duty (Wikipedia). Police officers often commit eight types of crimes: profit motivated crimes, off duty public order crimes, drug crimes, on duty abuse, obstruction of justice, the administrative/failure to perform and conduct related probationary failures (Kane & White, 2009). In their study on career ending misconduct among New York City police officers, Kane and White (2009 proposed that career ending misconduct in the NYPD rarely occurs, supporting literature that claims that the majority of police officers perform their duties without engaging in misconduct. However, Ivkovic (2009) notes that studying police records can be misleading in depicting the prevalence of police misconduct. Thus, these records grossly underrepresent the actual extent of police misconduct.

Police misconduct may be hard to detect. One reason for this is because lying and deception are an essential part of police functioning. Loyalty to other officers is of most importance, even when misconduct occurs (Banks, 2009, p. 26). Furthermore, because of the low visibility of street level officer conduct, occurrences of misbehavior often go unnoticed.

The collection of data on police misconduct poses difficulties as well. Frank (2009) writes that the use of official data is not representative of the actual prevalence of police misconduct. For misconduct to become recorded in official records, it must first be uncovered then processed. This poses a problem because some organizations may not want certain forms of misbehavior to appear in department reports, and agency reports may not contain all relevant information.

There are significant risk factors that may make one prone to misconduct. According to Kane and White (2009), the strongest risk factors were being a black police officer, having an average of one or more complaints per year, and working in inspector