Pre-hire red flags predict police misconduct: study
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- The study analyzed pre-hire data and disciplinary records for 6,075 officers at more than 150 municipal, county, state, and federal agencies, tracking them for up to five years to identify which background factors predicted later misconduct.
- Officers with prior records of professional misconduct — written reprimands, suspensions, or terminations — were more than six times more likely to be fired at their new departments than those with clean disciplinary histories.
- Frequent job changes, bad credit, domestic violence, and temper problems were also strongly linked to higher misconduct risk, yet agencies largely ignored these red flags, with serious-incident candidates facing only marginally lower hiring odds.
- Prior law enforcement experience — typically viewed as a hiring asset — emerged as a significant risk factor: those officers were more likely to face accusations of excessive force, sexual harassment, and racism, and were nearly twice as likely to be sued for misconduct.
- Within five years of hire, one in five officers in the dataset had received at least one professional misconduct report, underscoring how widespread post-hire discipline problems are across U.S. law enforcement.
- Lead researcher Stephan Dilchert, an associate professor of management at Baruch College, called for national police hiring standards and legal protections for agencies sharing disciplinary records, arguing departments must stop 'looking the other way' at red flags.
Why it matters: The U.S. has no national standards for police hiring, meaning thousands of independent agencies run inconsistent processes and disciplined officers can simply move between departments — and the study's most provocative finding challenges a core hiring convention: that prior law enforcement experience makes a candidate safer, when the data shows experienced hires are nearly twice as likely to be sued for misconduct.
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