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Team studies ‘Police Integrity Lost’

A University criminal justice team is developing the first national profile of police integrity, through an analysis of police crime committed by sworn law enforcement officers. A National Institute of Justice (NIJ) grant in excess of $260,000 will fund the work of faculty members Dr. Philip Stinson, principal investigator for the project, and co-investigators Drs. John Liederbach and Steven Lab. NIJ is part of the U.S. Department of Justice. 

The focus of the 24-month research project is to study the arrest records of on– and off-duty law enforcement officers across the nation, using advanced methodologies. It builds on previously published studies by Stinson and Liederbach.

According to Stinson, the research is important because there are no comprehensive statistics available on problems with police integrity, and no government entity collects data on criminal arrests of U.S. police officers.

“The lack of statistics on police crime should be troubling to police executives, researchers, policymakers and the general public,” he added.

Stinson and his colleagues expect to determine the nature and extent of police crime nationally.

“Police agencies cannot formulate effective policies to confront these problems until they know what types of crimes police are most likely to commit and the factors that seem to influence their commission,” Stinson said.

The research team will also seek to discover to what extent police crime arrests correlate with other forms of police misconduct. This information may help guide the development of strategies to better identify problem officers and those at risk for engaging in police misconduct and devise early intervention processes.

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 project will also be archived at the National Archives of Criminal Justice Data for use by other researchers in replication studies.

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in the news
BGSU undergraduate enrollment up 1.1 percent - Sentinel-Tribune - The Blade

Semester headcount shows small change

In spite of the economic downturn, BGSU undergraduate student enrollment is holding fairly steady, according to the spring semester 15-day report released Jan. 24.

Undergraduate enrollment on the Bowling Green campus grew by 1.1 percent, or 151 students, as compared to spring 2011. Eighty new freshmen joined the Bowling Green campus this semester, part of the 13,814 undergraduates on the main campus.

BGSU Firelands campus lost 102 students, for a 4.2 percent decline, compared to last year. Firelands has 2,303 students this spring.

As expected, graduate student numbers were down more significantly, a reflection of the decrease in enrollment in fall 2011. The Bowling Green campus had 2,409 graduate students — 235 fewer than at this time last year, an 8.9 percent decline.

The total headcounts for each campus were 16,223 for Bowling Green and 2,303 at Firelands, for a combined total of 18,526 students — a 1 percent overall decrease from last year.

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