Is Police Misconduct Contagious? Non-trivial Null Findings from Dallas, Texas

Abstract

Objectives: Understanding if police malfeasance might be "contagious" is vital to identifying efficacious paths to police reform. Accordingly, we investigate whether an officer's propensity to engage in misconduct is associated with her direct, routine interaction with colleagues who have themselves engaged in misbehavior in the past.

Methods: Recognizing the importance of analyzing the actual social networks spanning a police force, we use data on collaborative responses to 1,165,136 "911" calls for service by 3475 Dallas Police Department (DPD) officers across 2013 and 2014 to construct daily networks of front-line interaction. And we relate these cooperative networks to reported and formally sanctioned misconduct on the part of the DPD officers during the same time period using repeated-events survival models.

Results: Estimates indicate that the risk of a DPD officer engaging in misconduct is not associated with the disciplined misbehavior of her ad hoc, on-the-scene partners. Rather, a greater risk of misconduct is associated with past misbehavior, officer-specific proneness, the neighborhood context of patrol, and, in some cases, officer race, while departmental tenure is a mitigating factor.

Conclusions: Our observational findings-based on data from one large police department in the United States-ultimately suggest that actor-based and ecological explanations of police deviance should not be summarily dismissed in favor of accounts emphasizing negative socialization, where our study design also raises the possibility that results are partly driven by unobserved trait-based variation in the situations that officers find themselves in. All in all, interventions focused on individual officers, including the termination of deviant police, may be fruitful for curtailing police misconduct-where early interventions focused on new offenders may be key to avoiding the escalation of deviance.

Keywords: Contagion; Misconduct; Police; Social networks; Survival analysis.

Fig. 1

Covariate-specific risk of police misconduct (5% decay factor) for the Dallas Police Department (2013–2014). Parameter estimates $\widehat{\beta }$ (log intensity ratios; bullets) in descending order and 95% confidence intervals from a repeated-events survival model of days until a Dallas police officer engages in sanctioned police misconduct alongside the estimated variance of the gamma-distributed frailty parameters capturing officer-specific excess risk (inset, above). Note, when reading p values, $e$ symbolizes base-10 scientific notation such that $p=$ 8.97e−05 $=$ 8.97 $\times {10}^{-5}=$ 0.0000897

Fig. 2

Risk of police misconduct for the Dallas Police Department (2013–2014) associated with Calls with Deviant/Non-Deviant Colleagues using decay factors from 5 to 50%, identical control variables, and identical risk intervals (see Fig. 1)

Fig. 3

Officer-specific excess risk of police misconduct for the Dallas Police Department (2013–2014) based on the repeated-events survival model depicted in Fig. 1