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Introduction
Police misconduct has a corrosive effect on police organizations, the communities they serve, and the relationship between the two[1] . When police deviate from law or policy, it affects the legitimacy of the police, the tenor of police-community relations, and the cooperation of the public with law enforcement. Social science has examined several forms of police misconduct: the use of excessive force; illegal searches and seizures; bias in police stops; discourtesy and other unprofessional conduct. But across more than four decades of research on these topics, the accumulated empirical evidence is not voluminous, and our understanding of the well-springs of police misconduct and the organizational mechanisms by which misconduct can be better regulated is not very deep (see, in general, [48] National Research Council, 2004, p. 290).
For their part, police executives have increasingly assumed responsibility not only for sanctioning acts of misconduct but also for managing the risk of misconduct by their officers. Risk management does not rely on any one organizational mechanism, but early warning systems - also known as early intervention (EI) systems - have emerged as a key tool for managing the risk of misconduct as they have proliferated across the USA. EI systems have even become an accreditation requirement and a core element of Justice Department "pattern or practice" litigation and consent decrees ([27] Harmon, 2009; [60] Walker, 2003a), treated as a "best practice" of police administration[2] .
The logic that underlies EI systems is rooted in the empirical observation that small numbers of officers account for disproportionate fractions of citizen complaints, uses of physical force, and other symptoms of police misconduct. By monitoring indicators of police action that might signify misconduct, or "risk-related" outputs ([5] Bobb, 2009), police administrators identify officers who display symptoms of recurring problematic conduct, and intervene soon after such symptoms appear with counseling or retraining. EI would presumably serve to prevent a substantial volume of police misconduct. Thus EI systems are structured to detect short-term spikes in indicators that bear presumptive relationships to police misconduct: one or multiple indicators tracked over periods ranging from three months to a year. Commercially available software flags officers who reach or exceed specified thresholds on indicators.
EI systems are in an early stage of development, even in 2012,...