In the current paper, we examine departmental and court decision-making in criminal cases against police officers. The study has two objectives: 1) to examine variables that impact departmental decisions in criminal cases against police officers, and 2) to examine factors that affect case disposition/conviction decisions by the courts. To achieve these objectives, we analyzed nationally representative arrest data using multiple statistical approaches. The results obtained revealed important patterns that are critical to our understanding of how the courts and police departments decide matters relating to police criminality. For instance, victim characteristics significantly influenced decision-making by both the police agency and the court. Also, officer characteristics and crime types were important indicators of how offending officers were punished by both the courts and the agencies that employed them. Specifically, officers whose cases involved child victims and officers who were not familiar with their victims had greater odds of being convicted. The implications of our findings for policy and research in policing, especially research on police misconduct, are discussed.

在本文中，我们研究了部门和法院在针对警察的刑事案件中的决策。该研究有两个目标：1）研究影响警察刑事案件中部门决策的变量；2）研究影响法院案件处理/定罪决定的因素。为了实现这些目标，我们使用多种统计方法分析了具有全国代表性的逮捕数据。获得的结果揭示了重要的模式，对于我们理解法院和警察部门如何决定与警察犯罪相关的问题至关重要。例如，受害者特征极大地影响了警察机构和法院的决策。此外，官员特征和犯罪类型是法院和雇用他们的机构如何惩罚违规官员的重要指标。具体来说，案件涉及儿童受害者的警官和不熟悉受害者的警官被定罪的可能性更大。讨论了我们的研究结果对警务政策和研究，特别是对警察不当行为的研究的影响。