Police Misconduct in Exoneration Cases in Los Angeles County

Abstract

Police misconduct represents a profound societal issue with far-reaching consequences. Its detrimental effects encompass the discriminatory application of laws, harassment, physical violence and murder, corruption, wrongful arrests and wrongful convictions. These concerns have prompted efforts at making information about police misconduct more widely accessible to stakeholders. This report seeks to support these initiatives by exploring possible uses of information from the National Registry of Exonerations. We selected Los Angeles County to compare to a similar study of New York City. We wanted to determine how useful the information held by the Registry could be for identifying officers involved in misconduct. We also wanted to see what we could learn about the nature of police misconduct in Los Angeles County wrongful convictions.

Keywords: police, misconduct, exoneration, wrongful conviction, databases