Chicago police: 10% of officers generated 30% of complaints

[ucbalumnus]

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-to-predict-which-chicago-cops-will-commit-misconduct/
http://invisible.institute/police-data/

@fivethirtyeight.com

To avoid the overworked “bad apple” metaphor, the Invisible Institute prefers to call officers with many complaints against them “repeaters.” Repeaters only make up a small fraction of the more than 12,000 officers on Chicago’s force — perhaps 1 percent to 10 percent of the officers in the database, depending on where you draw the line — but are responsible for a huge fraction of the complaints: 10 percent of the officers who had received complaints generated 30 percent of the total departmental complaints since 2011. The 10 individual repeaters with the most complaints in the past five years averaged 23.4 complaints against them in that span.

In addition to the outsize number of complaints, Kalven said, repeaters have broader, cultural impacts, both within and outside of the department. Within the department, repeaters might normalize misconduct toward residents, pushing other cops toward wrongdoing. Outside of the department, the behavior of these officers can turn the community against the police. “That’s what the ‘few bad apples’ theory doesn’t capture: the kind of compounding, metastasizing arms that flow from the impunity of bad cops,” Kalven said.

The question is, why are police departments and police unions, who are overwhelmingly composed of officers who do not generate lots of complaints, resistant to removing the “few bad apples” who cause most of the trouble and damage the trust between the police and law abiding people in the areas that they patrol?

[zobroward]

I work with a lot of HR issues and I would say that % is low! two things I can say for sure the people who tell you they work harder than everyone else almost always do the least. and the same people pop up on the radar time and time again. work issues , inter-employee issues etc… just like bullies in junior high /high school. other people do occasionally have issues but mostly it is the usual suspects. it is up to those in charge to clean up.(which is much easier said than done) HR balancing is very difficult and HR with a union and civil servant status is 100000x harder(no not literally but it is not something I would volunteer to do as a job)

[partyof5]

It’s sad that nothing will probably change.

[Iglooo]

10% doing 30% damage doesn’t sound sp bad. I would have thought 1% doing 50%. Just look at classrooms, one or two bad apples hold up the progress of the majority.

[zobroward]

igloo I agree
however it is probably more like .01% doing 99% …with every segment/profession in society.