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-- taser: excessive force, including usage not according to guidelines, resulting in excessive injury or death; also, improper taser use may be recorded as "brutality;"
-- color of law, including incidents involving misuse of authority such as bribery, soliciting favors, extortion by threat of arrest, or using badges to avoid arrest;
-- perjury, including false testimony, dishonesty during investigations, and falsifying charging papers or warrants; and
-- raids, including misconduct during warranted or warrantless operations or searches, wrong address raids, mistaken ones, use of no-knock ones when warrants require notification, or mistreatment during executions.
Misconduct status stages go from allegations to investigations, lawsuits, charges, trials, judgments, disciplinary measures, terminations, convictions, and sentences.
IE compiles data regularly, prepares daily and quarterly reports, and henceforth an annual one each January the following year. It explains that its statistics:
"should only be used (as) a very basic and general view of the extent of police misconduct. It is by no means an accurate gauge that truly represents the exact extent (of its extensiveness) since it relies on the information voluntarily gathered and/or released to the media, not (first-hand) by independent monitors who investigate complaints.....because no such agency exists for any law enforcement agency...."
Detailed quarterly and annual reports are produced, not monthly ones considered a less accurate "depiction of the overall extent of police misconduct...." Daily reports cover a sampling of individual incidents. Overall, IE provides a valuable reading of systemic police misconduct, though capturing only a snapshot of the full problem - widespread, abusive, violent, often with impunity, and when officers are held accountable, imposed discipline is usually mild, prison sentences rare and short-term, victims cheated by a criminally unjust system, favoring power over people, no matter the offense.
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