John Rappaport Interviewed in The Washington Post on the Problem of "Wandering Officers"

What happens when a police officer gets fired? Very often another police agency hires them.

During the past few weeks, the broadest national protests in U.S. history have centered on racism and police violence. In a new paper in the Yale Law Journal, Ben Grunwald and John Rappaport provide important context for contemporary discussions of policing, focusing on the phenomenon of “wandering officers,” law enforcement officers who are fired from one agency only to be rehired by another.

Using a novel data set of some 98,000 full-time law enforcement officers in Florida covering about 500 unique agencies over a 30-year period, Grunwald and Rappaport find wandering officers are relatively common — and they are far more likely than other officers to subsequently be fired or receive misconduct complaints.

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JR: Any reform proposal would have to be tailored to the reasons for the phenomenon. One potential reason is an information deficit. Police departments may not have access to background information about the officers they’re hiring, and in some cases that’s going to be because states don’t have databases that contain information about officers who were fired. And then there are holes in the national decertification index as well. The new bill that Congress just proposed seems to have provisions that are directly responsive to this problem.

Another possible explanation is that the chiefs doing the hiring don't realize how risky wandering officers are, or maybe they think that an officer who has just been fired will try to be on his best behavior. Our findings go a long way toward disproving that hypothesis, so some of this is just an education campaign. There are also more drastic measures on the table. Connecticut, for example, has prohibited law-enforcement agencies from hiring officers who have previously been fired. That's a nuclear option for states, which would have to be done along with data collection that allows you to identify when you're about to hire a wandering officer in the first place.

Read more at The Washington Post

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