2010 Q2 NPMSRP National Police Misconduct Statistical Report

By David Packman, on July 18th, 2010

The above map displays the number of law enforcement officers associated with reports of police misconduct in the first half of 2010. (click on the map for a larger image)

Introduction

The National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project (NPMSRP) was started in March of 2009 as a method of recording and analyzing police misconduct in the United States through the utilization of news media reports to generate statistical and trending information about police misconduct in the United States.

As part of this project, credible reported incidents of misconduct are aggregated into a publicly available news feed and then added into an off-line database where duplicate entries and updates are removed and remaining unique stories are categorized for the statistical information which is presented in this report.

While the use of news reports to generate statistical data may seem strange, keep in mind that police departments do not normally release any detailed information about disciplinary matters, and sometimes they don’t release any information at all. The use of court records by themselves would only garner information about misconduct cases that were successfully prosecuted and would miss confidential settlements and cases of misconduct that were not prosecuted but did result in internal disciplinary action. Therefore, the use of media reports, while not perfect, represents the most efficient method of data gathering available at this time.

It should also be noted that the use of media reports acts as a filter that limits the number of outwardly questionable allegations of misconduct, but that this may also increase risks of under-reporting due to laws that limit the amount of information law enforcement agencies report to the press. Therefore, if anything, the resulting statistics we publish should be considered as a low-end estimate of the current rate of police misconduct in the United States and for any locality we cite.

Additionally, In order to allow for accurate comparisons between this project’s statistics and the US DOJ/FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) statistics, it should be noted that this project utilizes the same methodology federal government uses to generate crime rate statistics by way of a hierarchical reporting system that only records the most serious allegation when more than one allegation is associated with an singular alleged incident of misconduct. It should also be noted that both the federal government crime statistics and the NPMSRP statistical reports are based on a combination of alleged and confirmed activity, not just convictions.

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Full credit and thanks to David Packman.