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

Area of Science:

• Criminology
• Sociology
• Public Administration

Background:

• Police misconduct poses significant challenges to public trust and effective law enforcement.
• Understanding the social dynamics within police departments is crucial for developing successful reform strategies.
• The potential for misconduct to spread through peer interactions (contagion) is a key area of inquiry.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether police officers' exposure to colleagues with misconduct histories influences their own propensity to engage in misconduct.
• To determine if social networks and peer behavior are significant factors in police deviance.

Main Methods:

• Utilized data from 3,475 Dallas Police Department officers over 2013-2014, analyzing 1,165,136 "911" calls.
• Constructed daily social networks based on collaborative responses to calls for service.
• Employed repeated-events survival models to link interaction networks with reported and sanctioned misconduct.

Main Results:

• Officer misconduct risk was not associated with the misconduct of on-scene partners.
• Factors like prior officer misconduct, individual officer proneness, and neighborhood context were linked to increased misconduct risk.
• Departmental tenure was found to be a mitigating factor against misconduct.

Conclusions:

• Findings suggest that police misconduct is not primarily spread through negative socialization or peer contagion.
• Individual-level factors and contextual elements appear more influential than social network interactions.
• Interventions targeting individual officers, including early intervention and removal of officers with repeated misconduct, may be effective for police reform.