An Ex-Cop Keeps The Country’s Best Data Set On Police Misconduct

By Carl Bialik

When Talking Points Memo, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post needed data on how often police officers are charged with on-duty killings, they all turned to the same guy: Bowling Green State University criminologist Philip M. Stinson.

Phil Stinson.

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Stinson, 50, has become an indispensable source for researchers and reporters looking into alleged crimes and acts of violence by police officers because he has built a database tracking thousands of incidents in which officers were arrested since 2005. His data has shown that even the few police officers who are arrested for drunken driving are rarely convicted and that arrests spike for cops who have been on the force 18 years or longer, contrary to prior research showing it was mostly new officers who were acting out.
The whole data-collecting operation is powered by 48 Google Alerts that Stinson set up in 2005, along with individual Google Alerts for each of nearly 6,000 arrests of officers. He has set up 10 Gmail addresses to collect all the alert emails, which feed articles into a database that also contains court records and videos.
It all adds up to a data set of alleged police misconduct unmatched by anything created inside or outside of government, which itself often uses Google Alerts to catch these cases.¹ Yet Stinson’s database inevitably has holes because it relies on the media to cover every officer arrest, and because it takes immense effort to code each entry. The data set keeps falling behind.
Stinson’s path to police-misconduct expertise was a winding one. A high-school dropout, he worked for police departments in Arlington, Virginia, and Dover, New Hampshire, before getting his law degree, then turning in his license after mishandling client funds. He switched to criminology, getting his Ph.D. in 2009. He chose his research subject in part because of his experiences as a cop, seeing police officers get away with crimes others wouldn’t, and in part because he wanted to win a bet he’d made in his Master’s program. Now he’s the recipient of a National Institute of Justice grant to study police misconduct, host of an occasional podcast on the topic, and a go-to source for the media.
Stinson says he has no bias against his former profession. “This isn’t anti-police,” he said. “I hope to write papers and get things published that are helpful to law enforcement, not that bash law enforcement.”
The following is an edited transcript of my telephone interview with Stinson, with some followup questions by email.
Carl Bialik: You’ve worked with the media on stories about arrests for killings by police, and recently you’ve also been a source on arrests of police for DUIs. You’ve also studied sex crimes and corruption. How did you become the expert on police arrests?
Philip Stinson: The idea came up in the fall of 2004, when I was finishing my master’s at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. I was taking an ethics class. Somebody in the class — it was a bunch of cops in class, mid-career — somebody made a comment that cops don’t get in trouble much. I said, “That’s just absurd.” I started looking into it and realized there are no government statistics, and no government agency tracking it well.
I set up 48 Google Alerts, let it rip, and started printing pages out. Originally it was to win a bet in the master’s class.
CB: What did you bet?
PS: I don’t know. It was a beer or something. I wasn’t a betting man. It wasn’t anything big.
I had two and a half years, three years of data in my dissertation, covering 2005 to 2007, with 109 quantitative variables.
And then over time at Bowling Green, we now track 270 or so quantitative variables. Everything is automated now. Because data collection is real-time — you can’t use Lexis Nexis, NewsBank, all these other archival news databases, because lots of stuff has disappeared from the Internet — so because of that it’s very slow and time-consuming. It takes forever to do.
Some reporters wanted everything I had — everything. I was like, go fuck yourself. You get everything. I just spent 10 years on this.
Now we’re up to almost 11,000 cases involving almost 9,000 officers. We log these cases, then make Google Alerts on individual names so we can track cases through courts and the media.²
CB: How sure are you that The Washington Post’s count of 54 police officers charged with fatal shootings while on duty is a complete count?
PS: I want to make it very clear I’ve never claimed I have every case. It’s possible that’s not an exhaustive list. If anything, I think we’re missing just a handful of cases of killings, because those kinds of cases get news coverage. I’d have to hazard a guess that we do a better job of collecting data in smaller metropolitan areas and rural areas, because arrests there are so newsworthy.
CB: How much do you think you miss by relying on media reports?
PS: If I had 1,100 arrest cases, I can’t believe there are another 1,100 out there. I doubt we’re missing half, but there aren’t none.
CB: You were a lawyer before going to graduate school for criminology. What happened?
PS: I fucked up in my law practice [Stinson Law Associates, PC, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania]. I was charged with several crimes and the commingling of funds in 2002. It was the kiss of death. I paid a heavy price and took a heavy hit.
CB: Did you do what you were charged with doing?
PS: I did it. [“Chronic sleep deprivation exacerbated mental health issues that I was not aware that I had and led to impaired judgment in many instances, and for that I’m very remorseful and in treatment,” Stinson told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2002.] Everybody was made whole eventually.
I don’t like to leave that out [that I did this]. It’s not something I’m proud of, and I don’t like seeing it in print. It really has nothing to do with why I am doing this research.
I certainly think I’ve done everything I can to rehabilitate myself.
If I were teaching theology, it would never come up, but in criminology, it does come up sometimes with students, so I usually walk into the classroom and lay it out there.

A photo of Stinson from summer 1986 when he was a police officer in Dover, New Hampshire.

Courtesy of Philip M. Stinson

CB: What was your experience as a cop and did it influence your work?
PS: When I went to New Hampshire, I saw some crazy shit. It really changed my outlook on things. When people were arrested, they would take them into the booking room, and sometimes the sergeant would come in and just beat the shit out of the guy while he was handcuffed — shit like that.
I was floored with my experience up there. In the two years I was up there, I saw all kinds of shit I did not know happened.
They faked reports, and there was creative report writing, to fit the arrest they wanted to have. There was evidence that was tampered with and overly suggestive court identifications to nail people with shit. It was quite an eye-opener. [When asked for comment, Anthony Colarusso, chief of Dover’s police department, said, “I feel strongly that the Dover Police Department has a high level of integrity and has had that since I joined the police department in May of 1985. In fact, our longstanding policy is that officers be terminated for any level of untruthfulness.” He added, “No police department is perfect, but we are very aggressive in holding ourselves accountable for our actions.”]
So I sort of had that kind of stuff in the back of my head for many years.

Read the rest @ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/an-ex-cop-keeps-the-countrys-best-data-set-on-police-misconduct/