How To Predict Bad Cops

[Fueri]

The question is an important one. We want to support the police, but what to do in the face of some of the stuff we've been seeing lately.

Turns out there is data available on this stuff, of course. That the Chicago Police department didn't want to turn over, of course. But it was eventually released. A few bad apples seems to be statistically supported.

One of the questions then is what to do about them.



Full article here:

How To Predict Bad Cops In Chicago

exerpt:

"Jamie Kalven, writer and founder of the Invisible Institute, spent years investigating police misconduct in Chicago public housing projects but was frustrated by the department’s failure to release any information on the subject — not even its own records of complaints against officers. In collaboration with the University of Chicago’s Mandel Legal Aid Clinic, Kalven pursued lawsuits against the department, first forcing the city to release lists of the officers with several complaints against them. The Invisible Institute then filed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain all complaints against police officers from Jan. 1, 2011, through Dec. 7, 2015. (Efforts to compel the release of still more complaint data are ongoing but are at risk because of legal action by the Fraternal Order of Police.)

The extensive catalog of complaints against officers appears to bear out the theory of a few bad apples: Among the 7,758 police officers who received a complaint during that time period, more than half received less than one per year (officers with zero complaints do not appear in the database).
"Meanwhile, the bad apples seem to be the ones racking up the grievances.

To avoid the overworked “bad apple” metaphor, the Invisible Institute prefers to call officers with many complaints against them “repeaters.” Repeaters only make up a small fraction of the more than 12,000 officers on Chicago’s force — perhaps 1 percent to 10 percent of the officers in the database, depending on where you draw the line — but are responsible for a huge fraction of the complaints: 10 percent of the officers who had received complaints generated 30 percent of the total departmental complaints since 2011. The 10 individual repeaters with the most complaints in the past five years averaged 23.4 complaints against them in that span."

 

[bucs90]

This is an outstanding thread. Factual and rational.

Yes....the "few bad apples" theory is supported every single time actual stats are used


Once it's accepted that only a tiny % of cops are "bad"...we can move on to address how to deal with those bad ones. The #1 step in my opinion....is recruiting. PDS have retention problems and sometimes bad behavior is tolerated just for manpower.

Make the job more attractive and always have quality recruits ready to go....it will eliminate any who are kept on just for manpower.

 

[Fueri]

This is an outstanding thread. Factual and rational.

Yes....the "few bad apples" theory is supported every single time actual stats are used


Once it's accepted that only a tiny % of cops are "bad"...we can move on to address how to deal with those bad ones. The #1 step in my opinion....is recruiting. PDS have retention problems and sometimes bad behavior is tolerated just for manpower.

Make the job more attractive and always have quality recruits ready to go....it will eliminate any who are kept on just for manpower.

Thanks. I don't think policing should be a partisan issue.

I'd agree that getting quality recruits in the door is important.

Training is also important, as is a system whereby these guys can be identified and stopped before they end up on CNN.

The organizations themselves, I think, will have to buy into this and there will be a shitstorm with the unions to put into place metrics that drum these guys out, but some sort of statistical based model seems to make sense to at least explore.

 

[bucs90]

This is an outstanding thread. Factual and rational.

Yes....the "few bad apples" theory is supported every single time actual stats are used


Once it's accepted that only a tiny % of cops are "bad"...we can move on to address how to deal with those bad ones. The #1 step in my opinion....is recruiting. PDS have retention problems and sometimes bad behavior is tolerated just for manpower.

Make the job more attractive and always have quality recruits ready to go....it will eliminate any who are kept on just for manpower.

Thanks. I don't think policing should be a partisan issue.

I'd agree that getting quality recruits in the door is important.

Training is also important, as is a system whereby these guys can be identified and stopped before they end up on CNN.

The organizations themselves, I think, will have to buy into this and there will be a shitstorm with the unions to put into place metrics that drum these guys out, but some sort of statistical based model seems to make sense to at least explore.

You said it well. Police have the same problem the military has....recruits are all the same at first. You discover the turds later and they're a small %.

It shouldn't be partisan. But the media is smearing cops to try to save their ratings. And no one loves the hall monitor...so some politicians use that as a way to stir up emotions.

 

[EverCurious]

hmmm I could see maybe getting some counseling or idk people training for officers who have more than x complaints, but at the same time, I'm not entirely sure in this day and age where Darth Vader makes Star Wars racist, that we want to be like firing officers over complaints... Still it's worth looking into, perhaps it could be as simple as giving those folks a break from patrols for a while?

 

[Fueri]

hmmm I could see maybe getting some counseling or idk people training for officers who have more than x complaints, but at the same time, I'm not entirely sure in this day and age where Darth Vader makes Star Wars racist, that we want to be like firing officers over complaints... Still it's worth looking into, perhaps it could be as simple as giving those folks a break from patrols for a while?

yep, there are multiple options for dealing with it.

I figure an insurance actuary can calculate the risk and cost of just about anything. put those guys on it, calculate risk and costs and put in a system to retrain them, retask them or fire them if necessary

I'd agree that firing them would only be after a series of steps were taken, as that makes good sense both from a logical standpoint and from the standpoint of negotiating something into the union contract.

good point.