The Wandering Officer
![handle is hein.journals/ylr129 and id is 1716 raw text is: BEN GRLJNWALD & JOHN RAPPAPORT
The Wandering Officer
A BS T R ACT. Wandering officers are] aw- en forcement oficers fired by one department. some.-
times for serious misconduct, who then find work at another agency. Policing experts hold dispar-
ate views about the extent and characrer of the wandering-officer phenomenon. Some insist that
wandering oftiers are everywhere - possibly increasingly so-- and that they're dangerous. Others,
however, maintain that crirics cherry -pick rare anId egregious anecdotes that distort broader reali -
ties. In the absence of systematic dta, we simply do not know how common wandering ofticers
are or how much of a threat they pose, nor can we know whether and how to address the issue
through policy reform.
In this Article, we conduct the first systematic investigation of wanidering oticers and possibly
the largest quantitative study of police misconduct of any kmd. We introduce a novel data set of
all 98.000 full-time law-enforcement officers employed by almost 5oo different agencies in the
State of Florida ov er a thirty-year period. We report three principal findigs. First, in any given
year during our study, an average of just under ttoo officers who were pre viously fred-three
percent of all officers in the State -- worked for Flon:da agencies. Second, offcers who were fired
from their last job seem to face dificulty finding work. When they do, it takes them a long time,
and they tend to move to smaller agencies with fewer resources in areas with sightly larger com-
munities of color. Interestingly, though, this pattern does nor hold for otfcers who were hred ear-
lier in their careers. Third, wandering ofhcers are more likely than both oicers hired as rookies
and those hired as veterans who have never been fired to be fired from their next job or to receive
a complaint for a moral character violation. Although we cannor determine the precise reasons
for the firings, these results suggest that wandering ofhcers may pose serious risks. particularly
given how dificult it is to fire a police officer. We consider several plausible explanations for why
departments nonetheless hire wandering officers and suggest potential policy responses to each.
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The Wandering Officer
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