Steven L Brewer

Drink, drive, go to jail? A study of police officers arrested for drunk driving

The purpose of the current study is to provide empirical data on cases of police driving under the influence (DUI) of alcohol and/or drugs. The study identifies events that may have influenced the decision to arrest, including associated traffic accidents, fatalities, officer resistance, the refusal of field sobriety tests, and the refusal of blood alcohol content tests. The study is a quantitative content analysis of news articles identified through the Google News search engine using 48 automated Google Alerts queries. Data are analyzed on 782 DUI arrest cases of officers employed by 511 nonfederal law enforcement agencies throughout the United States. The study is the only study known to describe police officer DUI arrests as they occur within police agencies across the United States.

A Study of Drug-Related Police Corruption Arrests

Purpose – The purpose of the study is to provide empirical data on cases of drug‐related police corruption. It identifies and describes incidents in which police officers were arrested for criminal offenses associated with drug‐related corruption.Design/methodology/approach – The study is a quantitative content analysis of news articles identified through the Google News search engine using 48 automated Google Alerts queries. Statistical analyses include classification trees to examine causal pathways between drugs and corruption.Findings – Data were analyzed on 221 drug‐related arrest cases of officers employed by police agencies throughout the USA. Findings show that drug‐related corruption involves a wide range of criminal offenses, and that cocaine is the most prevalent drug. Older officers and those employed by large agencies are less likely than others to lose their jobs after a drug‐related arrest.Research limitations/implications – The study is limited by the quality of the available content in ea...

Police Sexual Misconduct A National Scale Study of Arrested Officers

Police sexual misconduct is often considered a hidden crime that routinely goes unreported. The current study provides empirical data on cases of sex-related police crime at law enforcement agencies across the United States. The study identifies and describes incidents where sworn law enforcement officers were arrested for one or more sex-related crimes through a quantitative content analysis of published newspaper articles and court records. The primary news information source was the Google News search engine using 48 automated Google Alerts. Data are analyzed on 548 arrest cases in the years 2005-2007 of 398 officers employed by 328 nonfederal law enforcement agencies located in 265 counties and independent cities in 43 states and the District of Columbia. Findings indicate that police sexual misconduct includes serious forms of sex-related crime and that victims of sex-related police crime are typically younger than 18 years of age.

Federal Civil Rights Litigation Pursuant to 42 U.S.C. §1983 as a Correlate of Police Crime:

The Civil Rights Act of 1871 (codified at 42 U.S.C. §1983 and commonly referred to as Section 1983) provides a civil remedy for aggrieved persons to sue state actors who under the color of law violate federally protected rights. Since the 1960s, there has been an explosion of Section 1983 litigation in the federal courts against police officers and their employing municipal and county agencies. Due to a lack of official statistics and poor methodologies, research has yet to determine how common Section 1983 actions are against the police nationwide. This study examines the relationship between police crime and being named as a party defendant in a federal court Section 1983 civil action. Using a list of 5,545 nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers who were arrested for committing one or more crimes during the years 2005 to 2011, searches were conducted in the federal courts’ Public Access to Courts Electronic Records (PACER) system to locate Section 1983 actions against those officers. The authors found that 22% of all arrested officers were named as a party defendant in a Section 1983 federal court civil action at some point during their law enforcement careers. Additional findings address various predictors of a police officer being sued in a Section 1983 action.