> The “few bad apples” theory of police violence posits that a small portion of the police force is ill-intentioned or inclined to misconduct or violence, while the majority of officers are good cops.
One of the middle paragraphs that I believe you are referring to:
> In addition to the outsize number of complaints, Kalven said, repeaters have broader, cultural impacts, both within and outside of the department. Within the department, repeaters might normalize misconduct toward residents, pushing other cops toward wrongdoing. Outside of the department, the behavior of these officers can turn the community against the police. “That’s what the ‘few bad apples’ theory doesn’t capture: the kind of compounding, metastasizing arms that flow from the impunity of bad cops,” Kalven said.
If the OP -- and the people that the OP cites -- has the correct interpretation of "bad apples", then the very point of examining the "bad apples theory" would be to capture the "kind of compounding, metastasizing arms that flow from the impunity of bad cops"...the way that quoted graf is phrased, it's as if the "bad apples theory" (and I think "theory" is being used incorrectly here, perhaps) were something different than the idea that bad apples cause the good apples to rot.
I skimmed the article twice but didn't see any chart, stat, or anecdote that alluded to examination of the impact of an officer on their precinct. That is, when a "bad apple" moves to a new precinct, does that precinct's rate of complaints increase in addition to the bad apple's expected rate of complaints?
The OP is mostly concerned with controlling for factors to argue that bad apples really are bad apples and not because they are in bad environments:
> Even after controlling for neighborhood, however, individual officers with more complaints in 2011-13 remained more likely to have complaints filed against them in 2014-15.
Which of course...is very important to analyze. But it seems straightforward to do a event-time analysis in which, after a major disciplinary incident, or even just a string of minor incidents, in which an officer is apparently unsanctioned, does that impact the rate of misconduct complaints among the other officers in the subsequent months? This could be applied to both bad officers who are being moved around (e.g. Prezbo-style as in "The Wire") or who, for whatever reason, don't get moved around.