Intervention With Problem Officers

Abstract

Police executives have increasingly assumed—or they have been compelled to accept—responsibility for managing the risk of misconduct by their officers through the implementation of early intervention (EI) systems, even though social science has provided very little evidence on their effectiveness, or on their unintended effects. We examine the effects of one police agency’s EI system intervention, the Officer–Civilian Interaction (OCI) School, on indicators of risk-related outcomes—personnel complaints, citizen complaints, use of force, and secondary arrests—and on productivity—arrests, and proactive arrests—for 118 graduates and 118 matched controls. We found that the changes in risk-related outcomes were very similar for both treatment and control groups, and that OCI trainees made fewer proactive arrests and fewer arrests overall than the controls after the training. The implications for managing the risk of misconduct are discussed.