Intervention With Problem Officers

Abstract

Police executives have increasingly assumed-or they have been compelled to accept-responsibility for managing the risk of misconduct by their officers through the implementation of early intervention (EI) systems, even though social science has provided very little evidence on their effectiveness, or on their unintended effects. We examine the effects of one police agency's EI system intervention, the Officer-Civilian Interaction (OCI) School, on indicators of risk-related outcomespersonnel complaints, citizen complaints, use of force, and secondary arrests-and on productivity-arrests, and proactive arrests-for 118 graduates and 118 matched controls. We found that the changes in risk-related outcomes were very similar for both treatment and control groups, and that OCI trainees made fewer proactive arrests and fewer arrests overall than the controls after the training. The implications for managing the risk of misconduct are discussed.

Early intervention systems for police: a state-of-the-art review

“…An EI system provides supervisors and managers the opportunity to address problematic officer behavior in a positive and productive way (Bouche et al, 2016;Stephens, 2011). EI systems are data-driven; they track performance indicators and identify at-risk officers based on certain thresholds, which can trigger an intervention with the officer and postintervention monitoring by the supervisor (Walker et al, 2005;Worden et al, 2013). An EI system alerts an agency when a performance indicator or combination of performance indicators meets a certain threshold, such as a specific number of complaints in a certain time frame.…”

“…Of these, findings are generally positive but mixed, and most have been limited to individual agencies (e.g. Charette, 1994;Walker et al, 2001;Worden et al, 2013). Despite this variation in results, most studies have found that EI systems have a positive effect on officer misconduct and accountability.…”

“…These studies analyzed complaints, uses of force, officer-involved shootings, arrests, force-related lawsuits and the EI systems' effect on these police behaviors. They generally find positive or mixed findings (Bobb et al, 2009;Lersch et al, 2006;Macintyre et al, 2008;Worden et al, 2013).…”

“…In addition to the reduction in complaints found in the multiagency studies, evaluations of single police agencies found a reduction in complaints in the EI systems' studies of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department (LASD) between July 2003 and May 2008 (Bobb et al, 2009), the Victoria State Police in Australia between 1997and 2004(Macintyre et al, 2008, a large police agency in the southern United States in 2000 (Lersch et al, 2006) and a large police agency in the northeast United States between 1987 and 2001 (Worden et al, 2013).…”

“…More specifically, the LASD study found a substantial reduction in complaints, for three years after the EI intervention with the officer (Bobb et al, 2009;Worden et al, 2013). The study of the EI interventions in the Victoria State Police in Australia found a 71.07% complaint reduction over two years (Macintyre et al, 2008).…”