2% of Cops Cause Almost 100% of Police Brutality

A New Yorker Magazine archive from 2006 has an interesting bit about police brutality that is even more timely considering Trooper Martin's attack on the Oklahoma paramedic.

The article talks about a study of complaints of police brutality against Los Angeles Police Department officers. The results are fascinating. 21% of the officers were responsible for 100% of the complaints filed against the force, and 2% had at least 4 complaints against them during a 4 year period. That means that at least 80% of the police officers in L.A. over that period were decent, respectable people, and probably far higher than that. It's the 2% that cause 99.9% of the problems.

Trooper Martin in Oklahoma would be a good example of that 2%. The bad apples cause problems for not only the citizens they have sworn to protect, but plant seeds of mistrust and anger against all officers. Why police departments go out of their way to protect these criminals in their midst is beyond me.

"Fifteen years ago, after the Rodney King beating, the Los Angeles Police Department was in crisis. It was accused of racial insensitivity and ill discipline and violence, and the assumption was that those problems had spread broadly throughout the rank and file. In the language of statisticians, it was thought that L.A.P.D.'s troubles had a "normal" distribution—that if you graphed them the result would look like a bell curve, with a small number of officers at one end of the curve, a small number at the other end, and the bulk of the problem situated in the middle. The bell-curve assumption has become so much a part of our mental architecture that we tend to use it to organize experience automatically.

"But when the L.A.P.D. was investigated by a special commission headed by Warren Christopher, a very different picture emerged. Between 1986 and 1990, allegations of excessive force or improper tactics were made against eighteen hundred of the eighty-five hundred officers in the L.A.P.D. The broad middle had scarcely been accused of anything. Furthermore, more than fourteen hundred officers had only one or two allegations made against them—and bear in mind that these were not proven charges, that they happened in a four-year period, and that allegations of excessive force are an inevitable feature of urban police work. (The N.Y.P.D. receives about three thousand such complaints a year.) A hundred and eighty-three officers, however, had four or more complaints against them, forty-four officers had six or more complaints, sixteen had eight or more, and one had sixteen complaints. If you were to graph the troubles of the L.A.P.D., it wouldn't look like a bell curve. It would look more like a hockey stick. It would follow what statisticians call a "power law" distribution—where all the activity is not in the middle but at one extreme."

The article also points out the paradox police departments often place themselves in:

"The report gives the strong impression that if you fired those forty-four cops the L.A.P.D. would suddenly become a pretty well-functioning police department. But the report also suggests that the problem is tougher than it seems, because those forty-four bad cops were so bad that the institutional mechanisms in place to get rid of bad apples clearly weren't working."

There's more here if you want to read the full piece. Scroll down to number 2.

I'll continue to post updates on the Trooper Martin - Paramedic story as they happen.