About the Police Integrity Research Group

Dr. Phil Stinson joined the faculty at Bowling Green State University in 2009. He had previously worked as a police officer and an attorney. Dr. Stinson’s primary area of research are police behaviors, including police crime, police corruption, and police misconduct. Dr. Stinson’s research has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including Criminal Justice Policy Review, The Prison Journal, Victims & Offenders, and Journal of Crime & Justice. His research has also been featured in many news publications, including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Time, Los Angeles Times and FiveThirtyEight. Dr. Stinson has also appeared on CNN, MSNBC, CBS News, PBS, NPR, CBC, BBC, Sky News, and numerous other media outlets worldwide. His research was recently featured on the 2019 BBC documentary, Abused by the Police? Other research has appeared on the HBO series Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Dr. Stinson teaches a mix of undergraduate and graduate courses at BGSU, including Criminal Law, Procedural Rights, Criminal Justice Ethics, Criminal Justice Policy Analysis, and Law, Evidence & Procedure in Forensic Science.

Dr. Eric M. Cooke earned his Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from Sam Houston State University in 2021. He joined the faculty at BGSU as an Assistant Professor in 2022. His primary research interests include life-course and developmental criminology, developmental processes and trajectories, biopsychosocial criminology, risky behaviors among adolescents and young adults, the effects that early life adversities have on later life outcomes, and victimology. He teaches several undergraduate and graduate level courses including Research Methods for the Human Services, Introduction to the Criminal Justice System, and the Nature of Crime. He has published papers in Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Psychological Assessment, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Crime & Delinquency, and Psychiatric Quarterly.

Dr. Samantha Kopf earned her Ph.D. in Sociology with a focus in Criminology and Quantitative Methods from Bowling Green State University in 2023. She joined the faculty at BGSU as an Assistant Professor in 2023. Her primary research interests include life-course and developmental criminology, the effects of early life turning points (such as juvenile arrest and victimization) have on later life outcomes (such as family relationships, employment, and civic engagement), and victimology. She teaches several undergraduate level courses including Research Methods for the Human Services, Introduction to the Criminal Justice System, and the Juvenile Justice Subsystems. She has published papers in Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology, American Journal of Criminal Justice, and Crime & Delinquency.

John Liederbach earned his Ph.D. In Criminal Justice from the University of Cincinnati in 2002 and worked previously as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of North Texas before coming to BGSU in 2007.  He is primarily a police scholar, and his research focuses on the study of police behavior across community types, racial profiling, the processing of citizen complaints, and police crime.  He is the co-author of Police Patrol Allocation and Deployment (Pearson).  Dr. Liederbach also publishes in the area of white-collar crime and is a co-author of Digital Crime/Digital Terrorism (Pearson).  His research appears in a variety of scholarly journals including Justice Quarterly, Police Quarterly, and Criminal Justice Police Review. 

Dr. Adam Watkins received his Ph.D. in Criminology and Criminal Justice from the University of Missouri at St. Louis. He joined the BGSU faculty in 2010. His primary research interests include youth crime and evaluating crime control initiatives. Dr. Watkins has been involved in the evaluation of programs intended to reduce gun- and gang-related crime, as well as programs intended to reduce criminal behavior among court-involved youth and adults. Dr. Watkins takes great pride in being an alumnus of the undergraduate program in criminal justice at BGSU. The required internship as part of the program was instrumental in helping him decide that working with at-risk and court-involved youth was a career interest. He worked with such youth in community and residential settings before earning his Ph.D.