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.

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. 

Chloe Wentzlof joined the staff of the Police Integrity Research Group in 2018. She is currently a doctoral student at Bowling Green State University studying Sociology, with a focus on Criminology.  Ms. Wentzlof earned her master’s degree in Applied Statistics from BGSU in 2019. Previously, at Grand Valley State University, she earned bachelor’s degrees in Statistics and Criminal Justice. Her previous work with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation on sexual assault kit processing is published in Journal of Forensic Sciences. Her current research interests include using data mining and predictive analytic algorithms to understand agency and community responses to police crime.