Disciplinary Sanctions for Police Misconduct: An Empirical Analysis of Sanction Severity

• Published date: 01 March 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10986111231174831
• Author: Robert E. Worden,Christopher J. Harris,MoonSun Kim
• Date: 01 March 2024
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Police Quarterly

2024, Vol. 27(1) 80–108

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/10986111231174831

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Disciplinary Sanctions for

Police Misconduct: An

Empirical Analysis of Sanction

Severity

Robert E. Worden

1,2

, Christopher J. Harris

3

, and

MoonSun Kim

4

Abstract

The imposition of appropriate sanctions for substantiated police misconduct is im-

portant, but social science offers little evidence about whether the severity of sanctions

is related to the gravity of the misconduct, or disparities indicative of biased decision-

making, or simply arbitrary decision-making. We examine the application of sanctions

for police misconduct in one agency, analyzing sanctions imposed in 1,946 sustained

personnel complaints f‌iled against 1,026 off‌icers between 1987 and 2001. We f‌ind that

the nature of the misconduct accounts for some of the variation in sanction severity,

with internal bureaucratic violations sanctioned more severely than off‌icers’impro-

prieties vis-`

a-vis citizens. Among the latter, sanctions tend to be less severe than those

prescribed by either citizens or police off‌icers. We also f‌ind that sanction severity is

affected by off‌icers’characteristics, but also that much of the variation in sanctions is

unaccounted for, suggesting a large degree of unstructured decision-making.

Keywords

police discipline, police misconduct, police administration

1

School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany, SUNY, Albany, NY, United States

2

The John F. Finn Institute for Public Safety, Inc., Albany, NY, United States

3

UMass Lowell, School of Criminology & Justice Studies, Lowell, MA, United States

4

Department of Criminal Justice, College at Brockport, SUNY, Brockport, NY, United States

Corresponding Author:

Robert E. Worden, School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany, SUNY, 135 Western Avenue, Albany,

NY 12222, United States.

Email: rworden@albany.edu

Introduction

The investigation and disposition of complaints against police off‌icers is an integral

function of police administration and is also widely seen as a key element of police

accountability. Much of the attention to these issues, on the parts of academicians and

community advocates alike, has been f‌ixed on the front end of the complaint process:

intake, investigation, and adjudication. Far less attention has been given to the back end

of the process, at which sanctions are imposed, inasmuch as the details of these

personnel actions are normally shielded from public view. In the absence of systematic

data, some observers opine that the punishments imposed on off‌icers tend to be light –

too light to serve as effective deterrents to misconduct.

1

Others hold that the sanctions

are arbitrary, inconsistent, and excessive –so unfair as to undermine the legitimacy of

the disciplinary system in off‌icers’eyes (Crank, 2004;Curry, 2004;Reynolds et al.,

2018;Reynolds & Hicks, 2015). But the empirical evidence on the imposition of

sanctions for police misconduct is thin; rarely do social scientists obtain and analyze

data on sanctions to produce f‌indings against which these suppositions could be

compared. Hence the scientif‌ic literature provides no persuasive answers to questions

about the severity of police discipline, whether the sanctions are proportional to the

gravity of the misconduct, and the extent to which they exhibit either identif‌iable

disparities that may be indicative of biased decision-making or inexplicable variance

that may ref‌lect the kind of arbitrary and capricious decision-making that is sometimes

alleged.

The operation of police disciplinary systems is, in addition, a window on the larger

police bureaucracy, albeit one that is normally shuttered to academics and other outside

observers. Writing in 1981, Michael Brown observed that “the focus of bureaucratic

rules and regulations in a police department and the preoccupation of supervisors is

with corruption, drinking and sleeping on duty, marital inf‌idelity, the destruction and

abuse of city property, an off‌icer’s appearance, and the like. In fact, supervisors are

more concerned with the enforcement of minor rules and regulations than with a man’s

conduct on the street …” (1981, p.88). Brown (and many others) characterized police

departments as “punishment-centered bureaucracies”(Gouldner, 1954), and not-

withstanding the rhetoric that police discipline should not be punitive, police disci-

plinary systems rely on punishment as a response to off‌icers’violations of rules and

regulations (see Violanti, 2011). The effectiveness of such negative discipline in

improving police off‌icers’performance has been questioned (e.g., Stephens, 2011).

Moreover, we might reasonably speculate that how and how severely off‌icers are

punished, and for what, ref‌lects bureaucratic priorities. Departments that expect off‌icers

to be “productive”in an enforcement sense, making arrests and issuing citations, might

recognize that productivity could be discouraged if occasional excesses or mistakes of

judgment are punished severely. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in which

Brown conducted his f‌ield work in the 1970s, and the LAPD scrutinized by the

Christopher Commission 20 years later (Independent Commission, 1991), exemplify

this organizational model. And though police administrators of the 21

st

century are

Worden et al. 81