The Officers Most Likely to Cause Problems Already Had a Record

The officers most likely to be sued for misconduct had something else on their resumes: they’d done this job before.

That is the somewhat jarring upshot of a new study tracking more than 6,000 law enforcement officers across 150 American agencies over five years. Officers who came to their positions with prior experience in policing were nearly twice as likely to face a lawsuit for sustained misconduct compared with those who had never worn a badge before. They accumulated more complaints for excessive force, sexual harassment, and racist conduct. They cost more. And yet police departments continue to treat previous law enforcement experience as a selling point, a credential that streamlines hiring and reduces training costs. The data say otherwise.

The study, published this week in the Journal of Applied Psychology, is the first large-scale effort to map specific pre-hire warning signs onto specific categories of later misconduct. Stephan Dilchert, an associate professor of management at Baruch College, City University of New York, and colleagues drew on a psychological screening database built up over years of work with agencies ranging from small municipal departments to state and federal forces. Candidates had already received conditional job offers when their background data were collected, which means what the researchers were looking at was, in a real sense, the information departments already had in hand when they decided to hire.

What the agencies mostly did with that information was nothing much.

Disclosing a prior misbehavior, virtually any misbehavior, reduced a candidate’s chances of being hired by roughly 5% on average. A candidate with a prior domestic violence citation was essentially as likely to get the job as one without. Candidates who had already been written up, suspended, or referred for fitness-for-duty evaluations in a previous law enforcement role, one of the strongest single predictors of future trouble the researchers found, had odds of being hired barely distinguishable from those who hadn’t. There are about 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States operating more or less independently, with no shared national standard for what a red flag actually means or when it should disqualify someone. The result is a kind of institutionalized amnesia: each hire starts fresh.

The researchers used survival analysis, a technique adapted from medical research that accounts for both whether an outcome occurs and when it occurs, to estimate how much each pre-hire indicator raised an officer’s probability of later misconduct. The hazard ratios varied widely, from barely above chance to extraordinary. Officers who had a confirmed history of unjustified use of force in a prior policing job were roughly ten times more likely to be sued for misconduct at their new agency. A prior complaint for racially offensive conduct predicted future lawsuit risk at a factor approaching fifteen. A domestic violence citation predicted criminal detention or arrest posthire at a rate nearly six times higher than for officers without one. These are not marginal statistical signals; they are, in the researchers’ framing, automatic disqualifiers that agencies are largely choosing not to use.

“We need to stop assuming that experience equals better behavior by law enforcement officers,” said Dilchert.

The mechanism behind the experience finding is perhaps the most counterintuitive part of the story. Common sense would suggest that a candidate who has already passed psychological screening, academy training, and several years on the job represents a lower-risk hire than someone brand new. The data complicate that. Officers transferring between agencies bring their behavioral histories with them, including whatever conduct concerns led them to leave the first agency, but those histories are often incomplete or inaccessible to the hiring department. In parts of St. Louis County, Missouri, this pattern is common enough to have acquired a local name: the muni shuffle, where an officer under investigation resigns before the inquiry closes, keeps their state certification, and applies elsewhere. The new department, eager for trained personnel, never learns why they left.

Within five years of being hired, one in five of the 6,075 officers in the study had received at least one professional misconduct report. The clearest predictors, the ones the researchers designated Tier 1 population screening signals, were things many departments already collect but apparently weigh too lightly: written reprimands or suspensions in a prior law enforcement role, previous terminations under unfavorable conditions, employer warnings for negligence, and poor credit history. That last one may seem unrelated, but bad credit flagged elevated risk across multiple misconduct categories, predicting everything from official vehicle misuse to undesirable off-duty conduct to criminal charges. More than a third of all candidates in the study had some form of adverse credit history. It’s a common indicator and, it turns out, a useful one.

Still, it is the rarer signals that produce the sharpest numbers. Frequent job changes, multiple physical altercations, arrears on child support or alimony: none of these appeared in more than 6% of candidates, but all predicted elevated risk for serious misconduct, in some cases tripling or quadrupling the odds for specific outcomes. The study found that many of these rare indicators were being effectively ignored in hiring decisions, treated as oddities rather than disqualifiers.

The peculiar asymmetry the research exposes is this: departments act on misconduct quite decisively once it occurs. Officers found to have committed serious on-the-job violations were on average more than six times more likely to be terminated than clean officers. Sexual harassment, off-duty misconduct, and criminal conduct could each push that figure above twelve. So the behavioral norms exist. The willingness to act on them exists. What’s missing is the willingness to use the same standard of evidence at the hiring stage that is later applied when the damage is already done.

There are structural reasons for the gap. Union contracts in many jurisdictions restrict access to or mandate the destruction of disciplinary records. Legal liability concerns discourage previous employers from sharing information about departing officers. Thousands of independent agencies, each with different processes, different thresholds, and different resources for background investigation, are making consequential decisions in isolation. The researchers suggest that national standards, currently absent, would allow agencies to treat pre-hire misbehavior the way other high-stakes professions already do: as legally relevant criteria for disqualification rather than soft factors to be weighed at a hiring manager’s discretion.

Whether that happens is an open question. The cost of not acting, though, is measurable. One utility analysis in the study estimated that a department the size of the NYPD could save over half a million dollars in civil settlements per hiring cohort simply by screening out candidates with prior written reprimands in law enforcement, and that figure counts only one predictor, one type of misconduct outcome, and one cohort. The researchers are fairly blunt about what the true figure might be if agencies acted on the full picture they already have.

DOI / Source: https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0001322