Study: Philly cops with 'low self-control' more likely to shoot

Criminology researchers applied a theory of crime that is typically used to study reckless behavior to a detailed set of data obtained from nearly 2,000 Philadelphia police officers and found that police officers who exhibit low self-control are more likely to be in a police-involved shooting, according to a study published in the June issue of the journal Police Quarterly.

The researchers used eight factors to determine whether an officer had low-self control: whether he or she had been separated or divorced, ever had a suspended driver's license, received a traffic ticket in the last five years, been in a car accident, ever been fired, ever fallen behind in paying bills, had more than $1,000 in debt, and ever been under a court order.

The more of those determining characteristics an officer had, the more likely they were to shoot, said one of the study's co-authors, Alex Piquero, a professor of criminology at the University of Texas in Dallas who formerly taught criminal justice at Temple University.

"The important thing is that it's not one of these factors in particular that leads to officers discharging their firearms, it's the accumulation of them," Piquero said. "The more of these individual risk factors these officers had, the more likely they were to discharge their firearm."

Piquero and his fellow researchers used detailed data from Internal Affairs, the Police Board of Inquiry, and background files of 1,935 Philadelphia police officers gathered in 2000 as part of a previous study on police integrity funded by the National Institute of Justice and jointly conducted by the Philadelphia Police Department and Temple.

Although common sense might indicate that officers with low self-control are more likely to shoot, Piquero said it had never before been analyzed.

"The reason why is because these kinds of data are not routinely collected, and when they are, they aren't accessible to researchers," he said. He said they were fortunate because John Timoney was the police commissioner at the time and "he really cared about our project and was interested in providing data to better the department."

Timoney, a former top New York City police official, was Philadelphia police commissioner from 1998 to 2002, then led the Miami Police Department until 2010. He died last year.

For the recent study, the researchers applied to police officers Gottfredson and Hirschi's general theory of crime, which states that people with low self-control are more likely to engage in reckless behavior. The researchers said it was the first time that police shootings had been investigated "within a criminological theoretical lens."

Of the 1,935 police officers whose files were studied, only 104 — or about 5 percent — had been in an officer-involved shooting. Of those officers, 13 had been in two or more shootings and one had been in three or more police-involved shootings, according to the study. Piquero said the data he used did not indicate whether those shootings were fatal.

The average age of the subjects in the study was 27, and two-thirds were male. The study had a nearly even split of black and white officers.

Piquero said that the study is not intended to punish officers who may have characteristics that are indicators of low self-control, but that it could inform all police departments in future applicant screenings.

"It doesn't mean you don't want to hire people with more of these problems … it's not a red light, it's a yellow light," he said. "Proceed with caution. They may need more screening, more training, and more supervision over the course of their careers."