Police Crime

• In Event: Lightning Talk: Police Accountability

Abstract

The office of the county sheriff as an American law enforcement institution has often been neglected within criminal justice scholarship that has instead focused mostly on municipal police agencies. The county sheriff has however recently been the subject of increased scrutiny and criticism, mostly within the realm of political science literature that portrays the American sheriff as uniquely powerful, independent, and unaccountable to both the public and the criminal law. We use national-scale data on police crimes to identify and describe the crimes perpetrated by county sheriffs and compare them to the crimes perpetrated by other types of police executives in terms of crime types as well as organizational and legal outcomes.

Authors

• Philip Matthew Stinson, Bowling Green State University

• John Liederbach, Bowling Green State University

• Adam Watkins, Bowling Green State University