Bad Apples From Rotten Trees: A Study on Learned Misconduct in the Chicago Police Department

• In Event: 30662 - Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Policing Issues 1

Abstract

Prior research has pointed to police brutality being a racialized phenomenon. It also suggests that a key part of the issue is the ways officers are socialized into having violence-related values and behaviors. Utilizing social network data from Jain Sinclair & Papachristos (2022), this paper explores the way police misconduct in the form of excessive force spreads between officers serving a predominantly Black community and a predominantly white community. It finds that there are sizable disparities between reports of excessive force, the number and size of deviant officer groups, and the frequency of misconduct per officer in each community. It concludes by diving into the racialized nature of police brutality between the two communities and how these community-based differences in policing create and reinforce the racialized attribution of the “one bad apple” ideology.

Author

• Aliyah Smith, North Carolina State University