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THE SOCIAL ECOLOGY OF POLICE MISCONDUCT*
The present study examined whether variations in social ecological conditions in New York City police precincts and divisions have predicted patterns of police misconduct from 1975 to 1996. The study included misconduct cases involving bribery, extortion, excessive force, and other abuses of police authority, as well as certain administrative rule violations. Using a longitudinal framework, the analyses found that dimensions of structural disadvantage and population mobility-- drawn from the social disorganization literature - as well as changes in Latino population - drawn from the racial conflict perspective-- explained changes in police misconduct over time. Further, most of the variations occurred within, as opposed to between, precincts and divisions over time, strengthening the case for a longitudinal examination.
KEYWORDS: Police misconduct, social ecology, conflict theory.
Research grounded in the ecology of crime model generally has found that variations in the macro/structural characteristics of (primarily urban) communities have been associated with variations in crime and delinquency rates (Bursik and Grasmick, 1993; Bursik and Webb, 1982; Sampson and Groves, 1989; Shaw and McKay, 1942/1969). This relationship has even held when studied in a rural setting (Osgood and Chambers, 2000), when unofficial measures of crime have been used as the outcome (Warner and Pierce, 1993), and when an alternative outcome measure, such as fear of crime, has been specified (Taylor and Covington, 1993). Although much knowledge exists about the effects of neighborhood context on crime and delinquency in the general population, very little is known about how the structural covariates of social disorganization might influence the deviance patterns of police officers assigned to socially disorganized communities.
Social disorganization may create a context for police misconduct because (1) residents may not have in place the social networks necessary to organize against police malpractice, and (2) communities characterized by urban distress often experience high levels of police-citizen conflict due to lapses in police legitimacy. The next step in the study of police misconduct should link the perspectives of police coercion by place to the ecology of crime model in an attempt to explain patterns of police misconduct across territorial settings. The present study begins this integration and tests whether variations in the antecedents of social disorganization predict variations in police misconduct in...