Police officers were arrested 1,695 times for violations of their oaths to the public, messing with evidence, or lying in official statements from 2005 to 2012, according to a vast new data set on criminals in uniform released Tuesday.
The numbers, compiled by Bowling Green State University professor and former cop Phil Stinson, are likely a low-end estimate. As with police killings, there is no reliable centralized data on police crime. Stinson has sought to address both of those gaps by compiling his own numbers, using a combination of local news reports and court records. Stinson’s new database found more than 8,000 total criminal arrests of law enforcement officers in the United States in the 8-year period his team has thus far finished analyzing.