One of the most confounding distortions of language centers around the colloquialism of “bad apples” with regard to policing. The phrase is frequently used to minimize the severity of the policing problem in this country: Why say policing itself is the problem when we can focus on throwing out the few “bad apples” of the bunch?

The phrase’s origins, of course, speak to contagion and corruption: a few bad apples are capable of spoiling all the other “good” ones. And as a new study illustrates, these so-called “bad apples” don’t just spoil one department or community—all too often, cops fired because of egregious infractions just end up working for another agency.

The study, entitled “The Wandering Officer,” appears in the Yale Law Journal and marks “the first systematic investigation of wandering officers and possibly the largest quantitative study of police misconduct of any kind,” according to authors Ben Grunwald and John Rappaport. Focusing exclusively on Florida, Grunwald and Rappaport analyzed data on 98,000 full-time law enforcement officers in the state over a 30-year period. They found that “wandering officers”—cops fired from one agency only to be hired at another—were “relatively common,” according to the Washington Post.

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