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Jammed Up: Bad Cops, Police Misconduct, and the New York City Police Department

NCJ Number
241360
Author(s)
Robert J. Kane; Michael D. White
Date Published
2013
Length
238 pages
Annotation
This book examines more than two decades of research on police misconduct in the New York City Police Department (NYPD).
Abstract
This book examines the concepts of good and bad policing. Chapter 1 is an introduction to the issues of police misconduct. Chapter 2 reports on the literature that has attempted to define police misconduct and describe its prevalence; also reported is the empirical literature that has examined the causes and correlates of police misconduct. Chapter 3 describes the research setting and provides a historical treatment of police misconduct in NYPD. Chapter 4 identifies eight categories of career-ending misconduct, ranging from on-duty profit-motivated misconduct to off-duty public order crimes to administrative violations and "failure to perform" designations; also discussed is on-duty abuse of authority. Chapter 5 tests the bivariate relationships identified in chapter 4 by employing multivariate techniques to examine the individual-level predictors of police misconduct both for the total sample and for distinct racial/ethnic categories. Chapter 6 is a summary of several journal articles published between 2002 and 2006 which examine the social ecology of police misconduct, the consequences of police misconduct in structurally disadvantaged communities, and the crime reduction potentials of arrest-based police strategies. Chapter 7 provides theoretical explanations of police misconduct. Chapter 8 summarizes the findings, draws conclusions, and discusses both the strengths and limitations of the research while providing a model of good policing that is distinct from police misconduct. Tables, figures, notes, appendix, and references