Cops Aren’t Perfect—But Are They Exceptional?

In a policing class I once taught, I played Paul Harvey’s famous broadcast “What is a Policeman?” A student quickly challenged Harvey’s central point. He argued that police officers are not morally superior to the rest of society, pointing instead to corruption and misconduct. His challenge was fair. Police are not immune from failure, and when they do fail, it erodes trust. But his comment sent me home to do some digging. What I found was striking.

In fact, data compiled from multiple studies suggest that police officers are arrested at significantly lower rates than the general public. One study found that the annual arrest rate for officers nationally was about 0.72 per 1,000 officers—orders of magnitude lower than the adult male population overall. By contrast, the arrest rate for National Football League players—a group often admired for their discipline and success—is nearly 1,000 times higher (Stinson 2013). Police officers, it seems, are not immune to crime, but they are a statistical outlier in how rarely they are arrested compared to others.

Consider the comparison. Both policing and professional football are high-status, high-visibility careers. Both demand discipline, resilience, and the ability to perform under pressure. Yet the record of criminal misconduct could not be more different. Professional athletes, often emerging from lower socio-economic backgrounds, achieve sudden wealth and fame that, rather than insulating them from criminal behavior, sometimes enables it. Police officers, by contrast, often come from those same neighborhoods—barrios, ghettos, and working-class blocks. Some choose gangs, some choose policing. The difference is not circumstance, but choice.

What makes police officers exceptional is not that they are free of flaws but that they are carefully selected, tested, and trained from among tens of thousands who apply. When I served as a sergeant at the academy, only two recruits out of every 100 applicants survived the hiring gauntlet and probationary period. The vetting process alone sets officers apart from the general population in terms of character, temperament, and resilience.

The student in my class was right to raise the issue of police misconduct. His skepticism mirrors how many think today. True, corruption cases do exist, and they erode trust when they occur. But statistical and human evidence shows something else: Paul Harvey’s intuition about police officers was right. Decades before the studies, Harvey sensed—as did most of society—that officers were not average men and women in uniform, but an outlier group who, despite their flaws, stood apart from society in their resilience and integrity. So, when I returned to class I told the young man and the class: “Cops aren’t perfect, but they are exceptional.”

References

Stinson, Philip M., and John Liederbach. “Fox in the Henhouse: A Study of Police Officers Arrested for Crimes.” Criminal Justice Policy Review 24, no. 5 (2013): 601–625.

Harvey, Paul. “What is a Policeman?” Radio broadcast, 1970. Transcript available via The Paul Harvey Archives.