The Wandering Officer

• In Event: Contemporary Issues in Police Organizations

Abstract

The news media frequently reports stories about “wandering police officers”: officers who are fired for misconduct in one department and who are subsequently hired by another. Yet we have no systematic data about this phenomenon. This study uses a dataset on every police officer hired and fired over the last 40 years across an entire state to explore a series of empirical questions related to the wandering officer, including: the frequency with which officers who are fired for misconduct are rehired by another department; the distance such officers travel to be hired again; the performance of these officers after they are hired again; and the characteristics of the agencies that hire them.

Authors

• Ben Grunwald, Duke University School of Law

• John Rappaport, University of Chicago Law School