Disciplinary Sanctions for Police Misconduct: An Empirical Analysis of Sanction Severity

The imposition of appropriate sanctions for substantiated police misconduct is important, but social science offers little evidence about whether the severity of sanctions is related to the gravity of the misconduct, or disparities indicative of biased decision-making, or simply arbitrary decision-making. We examine the application of sanctions for police misconduct in one agency, analyzing sanctions imposed in 1,946 sustained personnel complaints filed against 1,026 officers between 1987 and 2001. We find that the nature of the misconduct accounts for some of the variation in sanction severity, with internal bureaucratic violations sanctioned more severely than officers’ improprieties vis-à-vis citizens. Among the latter, sanctions tend to be less severe than those prescribed by either citizens or police officers. We also find that sanction severity is affected by officers’ characteristics, but also that much of the variation in sanctions is unaccounted for, suggesting a large degree of unstructured decision-making.