Recent public attention to police departments reminded me of a draft paper I saw a few months ago, The Wandering Officer, that, since then, has appeared in print in the Yale Law Journal (click here). What the paper's authors, Ben Grunwald (Duke) and John Rappaport (Chicago), mean by a "wandering" officer is an officer fired by one department, sometimes for serious misconduct, who then finds employment as a sworn law enforcement officer at another agency. While the potential problems posed by "wandering" officers are obvious, less obvious within the criminal justice community, however, is the extent, character, and magnitude of the "wandering" officer phenomenon itself.
The paper digs into this phenomenon and with the benefit of a large data set from Florida identifies some broad, basic descriptive contours. The data set draws on "128,616 full-time law-enforcement job stints that spanned at least one day between 1988 and 2016; they correspond to 98,169 unique officers." While through 1998 officers under investigation were frequently allowed to "resign" before any involuntary termination, following 1998 the data set identifies those officers who resigned “'in lieu of separation' or 'while being investigated' for misconduct." The paper's three core findings are described in the excerpted abstract, below.
"... We report three principal findings. First, in any given year during our study, an average of just under 1,100 officers who were previously fired—three percent of all officers in the State—worked for Florida agencies. Second, officers who were fired from their last job seem to face difficulty finding work. When they do, it takes them a long time, and they tend to move to smaller agencies with fewer resources in areas with slightly larger communities of color. Interestingly, though, this pattern does not hold for officers who were fired earlier in their careers. Third, wandering officers are more likely than both officers hired as rookies and those hired as veterans who have never been fired to be fired from their next job or to receive a complaint for a “moral character violation.” Although we cannot determine the precise reasons for the firings, these results suggest that wandering officers may pose serious risks, particularly given how difficult it is to fire a police officer. We consider several plausible explanations for why departments nonetheless hire wandering officers and suggest potential policy responses to each."
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