Standing before a bank of microphones at a press conference and flanked by law enforcement officers, Mike O’Meara, president of the New York Police Benevolent Association, pulled his badge out of his pocket. “You know what?” he said displaying it before reporters. “This isn’t stained by someone in Minneapolis. It’s still got a shine on it, and so do theirs.” He pointed his finger to the cops behind him and repeated, “So do theirs.”
The reference was to the Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin and the unnecessary death of George Floyd. And the sentiment was clear: Don’t blame honorable officers for the behavior of one bad apple.
It’s easy to see where he’s coming from, especially if you’re just entering the conversation the country is now having about police and policing tactics. But it also skirts and uncomfortable fact. There are bad apples, and the police aren’t forthcoming in admitting it or proactive in reining in the offenders.
A 2014 review of NYPD officers reported to the the Civilian Complaint Review Board makes this clear. “CCRB Records show that 40 percent of the 35,000 officers on the force today have never been the subject of a citizen complaint,” say reporters Robert Lewis and Noah Veltman. “Another 20 percent have only one. Yet about a thousand cops have 10 or more complaints. One has been able to rack up 51.”
Drawing attention to the CCRB numbers, Omar Wasow, assistant professor of politics at Princeton University, says we need to think in terms of the Pareto Principle: “the vast majority of the outcomes are the result of only a small percentage of the inputs.”
Those thousand cops with ten or more complaints represent about 3 percent of the force. Not a big number, but the effect of their behavior is considerably outsized. And it’s the same elsewhere. Wasow points to Chicago, where a study showed “the worst 1 percent of officers generated about 25 percent of the complaints.” And here’s where O’Meara’s bad apple defense breaks down.
During the presser O’Meara complained police have “been left out of the conversation.” But much of that stems from law enforcement’s ongoing and dogged unwillingness to admit or share data on police misconduct. Rather, they’ve actively sought to keep such records in the dark.
Still, despite efforts to silence or squash information, records have come to light. In 2002, Philip Stinson a former cop and attorney, decided to assemble the data. It took time and effort but in 2017 he was able to unveil his findings in The Henry A. Wallace Police Crime Database.
While the database contains only about 20 percent of all state and local agencies, the numbers are damning. For the years 2005–2014, Stinson found over 10,000 criminal cases involving almost 8,500 local police officers arrested and charged with violent and nonviolent offenses ranging from bribery to theft, aggravated assault, even homicide.
In 2019, the San Jose Mercury News concluded its own six month investigation of police criminal records in California. “The review found 630 officers convicted of a crime in the last decade—an average of more than one a week.” What’s more, many officers convicted of crimes are still working as cops. “More than 80 law enforcement officers working today in California are convicted criminals,” the paper found, “with rap sheets that include everything from animal cruelty to manslaughter.”
Working with the USA Today Network, the Invisible Institute has compiled its own database of police misconduct, the largest of its kind ever assembled. The database, first made public in 2019, catalogs “at least 200,000 incidents of alleged misconduct, much of it previously unreported,” including “more than 110,000 internal affairs investigations by hundreds of individual departments and more than 30,000 officers who were decertified by 44 state oversight agencies.”
USA Today’s database reveals:
- 22,924 excessive force investigations
- 3,145 sexual misconduct allegations, including rape and child molestation
- 2,307 domestic violence cases
- 2,227 cases of flagrant dishonesty, including perjury, evidence and witness tampering, and falsifying reports
Beyond that, the database includes more than four hundred instances of cops obstructing investigations, “most often when they or someone they knew were targets.” And it seems as if that impulse toward obstruction, even if not a violation of the law, is mirrored by the departments themselves; the Invisible Institute was, for instance, forced to file several Freedom of Information Act requests to acquire its Chicago data.
While only about ten percent of officers are ever charged with misconduct, some, according to USA Today, “are consistently under investigation. Nearly 2,500 have been investigated on 10 or more charges. Twenty faced 100 or more allegations yet kept their badge for years.”
The result of this kind of malfeasance and the desire to keep it under wraps has had a corrupting effect on all of law enforcement. It’s like an abusive relationship. The bad get away with bullying and criminal behavior, the good are enlisted to keep silent and keep up appearances, and those of us on the outside are left to wonder what’s going on.
Does it strike anyone as odd—or even outrageous—that it takes activists and reporters to unearth misconduct by the police? Why don’t the police police the police and publicize their efforts? O’Meara might be right that his badge is unstained. But the reputation of police across the country is tainted by an unwillingness to be transparent and come clean on the problem of bad cops.
As Wasow points out, the low-hanging fruit of police reform is tossing the bad apples. Why do police departments insist on defending them instead?