Our group hopes to investigate the relationship between the diversity of police units and the frequency and severity of misconduct complaints. We expect that partnerships with officers of different races and/or genders would have fewer complaints lodged against them. We plan to use demographic data from complaints naming more than one officer and compare the demographics of these co-accused officers with the broader demographics of the entire department. Our hypothesis is that groups of racially and/or gender homogenous officers are more likely to have complaints filed against them, especially by individuals from outside of their racial or gender group.

It is common knowledge that diverse teams tend to outperform their homogenous counterparts, and it makes sense that this phenomenon would be particularly apparent in the high-stress type of interpersonal conflict resolution that defines police work. An investigation into this phenomenon is possible due to the data’s inclusion of both complainant and officer demographic data. Additionally, we would like to explore the impact that a complaint investigator’s demographic background might have on an investigation’s outcome since this data is also included in the CPDP data. A final phenomenon we want to investigate is whether members of the same unit or task force behave differently when working with their groups. While this phenomenon will likely not depend on demographic biases as strongly as the others we want to investigate, it is a potential source of in-group / out-group bias worth investigating all the same.