Criminal Justice Program: NIJ Grant

The grant funds the work of criminal justice faculty members Dr. Philip Stinson, principal investigator, and co-investigators Drs. John Liederbach and Steven Lab.

They are studying the arrest records of on- and off-duty police officers by reviewing archived news articles and records from 2005 to 2011 in an effort to develop the first national profile of police integrity. Additionally, they are using federal court records to investigate the connection between police crime and other forms of police misconduct.

Research project goals

• To determine the nature and extent of police crime in the United States.
• To determine what factors influence how a police organization responds to arrests of officers.
• To foster police integrity by exploring whether police crime and officer arrests correlate with other forms of police misconduct.

Improved methodologies

The BGSU investigators are gathering information using improved methodologies compared to previous studies. They have developed and implemented a relational database that is integrated with a digital imaging database. The database allows for electronic case login procedures, an integrated on-screen coding instrument, and an internal search engine for content analyses.

Law enforcement agencies, criminal justice policymakers and practitioners will benefit from the resulting nationwide data set, which the team will share through reports, peer-reviewed journal articles and Internet-based products geared specifically to them. The data set from this research study will ultimately be archived at the National Archives of Criminal Justice data for use by other researchers.