Federal Civil Rights Litigation Pursuant to 42 U.S.C. §1983 as a Correlate of Police Crime

• Author: Philip Matthew Stinson,Steven L. Brewer
• DOI: 10.1177/0887403416664115
• Published date: 01 March 2019
• Date: 01 March 2019
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0887403416664115

Criminal Justice Policy Review

2019, Vol. 30(2) 223 –253

© The Author(s) 2016

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DOI: 10.1177/0887403416664115

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Article

Federal Civil Rights Litigation

Pursuant to 42 U.S.C. §1983

as a Correlate of Police Crime

Philip Matthew Stinson Sr.1 and Steven L. Brewer Jr.2

Abstract

The Civil Rights Act of 1871 (codified at 42 U.S.C. §1983 and commonly referred to

as Section 1983) provides a civil remedy for aggrieved persons to sue state actors who

under the color of law violate federally protected rights. Since the 1960s, there has been

an explosion of Section 1983 litigation in the federal courts against police officers and

their employing municipal and county agencies. Due to a lack of official statistics and

poor methodologies, research has yet to determine how common Section 1983 actions

are against the police nationwide. This study examines the relationship between police

crime and being named as a party defendant in a federal court Section 1983 civil action.

Using a list of 5,545 nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers who were arrested

for committing one or more crimes during the years 2005 to 2011, searches were

conducted in the federal courts’ Public Access to Courts Electronic Records (PACER)

system to locate Section 1983 actions against those officers. The authors found that

22% of all arrested officers were named as a party defendant in a Section 1983 federal

court civil action at some point during their law enforcement careers. Additional findings

address various predictors of a police officer being sued in a Section 1983 action.

Keywords

police crime, police misconduct, 42 U.S.C. §1983, Section 1983, Civil Rights Act of

1871, civil rights litigation

The costs of police misconduct are staggering. The 10 cities in the United States with

the largest police departments collectively paid out more than US$1 billion during the

1Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, USA

2Penn State Shenango, Sharon, PA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Philip Matthew Stinson, Criminal Justice Program, Bowling Green State University, 223 Health & Human

Services Building, Bowling Green, OH 43403-0148, USA.

Email: stinspm@bgsu.edu

664115CJPXXX10.1177/0887403416664115Criminal Justice Policy ReviewStinson and Brewer

research-article2016

224 Criminal Justice Policy Review 30(2)

5-year period 2010 to 2014 for court judgments and settlements in police misconduct

cases (Elinson & Frosch, 2015). Those cities are Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Houston,

Los Angeles, Miami-Dade, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Washington,

D.C. A 2014 investigation by the Baltimore Sun determined that some police officers

face repeated police misconduct lawsuits, often resulting in numerous judgments and

settlements over the course of these officers’ careers (Puente, 2014).

The narratives in some of the high profile cases in cities of all sizes have become all

too familiar. In April 2015, a police officer shot and killed Walter Scott in North Charleston,

South Carolina. Scott, who was unarmed, was shot in the back as he ran from the officer

and died instantly. The officer’s first reaction after shooting Scott was to plant evidence

next to the fallen man’s body to make it look like he had grabbed the officer’s TASER (an

acronym for Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle). In October 2015, the City of North

Charleston, South Carolina, settled a lawsuit with the family of Walter Scott for US$6.5

million (Ford, 2015). John Geer was shot and killed by a Fairfax County, Virginia, police

officer in August 2013. Fairfax County paid US$2.95 million in April 2015 to settle a

wrongful death lawsuit with Geer’s family (Jackman, 2015). Shortly thereafter, the officer

who shot Geer was charged with murder. In December 2015, a police corporal with the

Dover Police Department in Delaware was acquitted of kicking a man in the head, even

though the incident was captured on dash-cam video in the officer’s patrol car. A month

after the conclusion of the officer’s criminal case, the city paid an undisclosed amount of

money to settle a civil rights lawsuit in federal court (Reyes, 2016). Shortly after the law-

suit was settled, the city paid the officer US$230,000 in consideration of his agreement to

resign from the police department (Fisher & Parra, 2016). Six Baltimore City, Maryland,

police officers faced criminal charges related to the April 2015 in-custody death of Freddie

Gray. In September 2015, the City of Baltimore agreed to pay Gray’s family US$6.4 mil-

lion to settle a civil suit (Wenger & Puente, 2015).

Although each of the cases discussed above received a lot of media attention, these

cases are the exception, not the rule. Most police misconduct lawsuits are never writ-

ten about in newspapers and the public rarely becomes aware of the true costs incurred

by municipalities across the country in settling these cases or paying court-ordered

judgments. Lawsuits that settle prior to trial are especially difficult to track because a

standard condition of settlement is often that the financial terms of the settlement are

confidential and not subject to disclosure. Rarely do the settlement agreement docu-

ments become part of the court record. Rather, counsel for the parties and the judge

will sign a stipulation of settlement, but the actual terms of the settlement are memo-

rialized in a separate document that is retained by the attorneys for the plaintiff and

defendant(s). The current study explores the relationship between sworn law enforce-

ment officers who are arrested and federal civil rights litigation against those officers

at some point during their law enforcement careers. It is important because it is the

only study known to the authors that counts federal civil rights lawsuits for police

misconduct on a nationwide level.

The review of the literature is organized in three sections. First, the phenomenon of

police crime is addressed in terms of defining the criminality of sworn law enforce-

ment officers. The second part of the literature review summarizes the statutory