Elected leaders

Today, Radley Balko asked his readers an interesting question as to whether appointing or electing law enforcement leadership had anything to do with police misconduct. It was an interesting question so I decided to run some analysis on our data and see if there were any correlations between misconduct rates and leadership selection types.
The results were sort of interesting.
First, just looking at overall misconduct per capita rates the results appear to indicate that agencies with elected leaders have less misconduct. Our 2009 Annual Report indicated that the national police misconduct rate was a projected 980.64 officers per 100,000. When we segment that into local Police Departments and Sheriff’s Offices we find that Police departments where leaders are appointed had a misconduct rate of 990.09 per 100,000 while Sheriffs offices where leaders are elected had a misconduct rate of 644.14 per 100,000.
Our 2010 data is somewhat similar in the breakdown. While the overall misconduct rate was 977.98 per 100,000, police departments had a misconduct rate of 1082.04 per 100,000 and sheriff’s agencies had a misconduct rate of 706.74 per 100,000.
So, it would seem that elected officials do better than appointed officials. However, when we look at the number of agencies and leaders implicated in misconduct we see something different.
In 2009 our data indicated that 10.8% of police agencies had officers involved in police misconduct while 7.8% of sheriff’s departments had officers implicated in acts of misconduct. But, in 2010 14% of police agencies had officers implicated in misconduct and 18% of sheriff’s departments had officers implicated in misconduct. Additionally, in 2010, 2.5% of police chiefs were implicated in acts of misconduct while 3.5% of sheriffs were implicated in misconduct. So, when we examine the numbers by agency the picture is a bit more muddled.
However, I personally think that, more importantly than how law enforcement leaders are selected, the laws and policies that govern those leaders and the people they lead are at least as equally important, if not more so. After all, even if you have a good leader in place, what good is it if state laws and local union agreements make it impossible for that leader to hold officers accountable for acts of misconduct?