The theory in How to Predict Bad Cops in Chicago suggests that if we can identify the repeaters and devise intervention mechanism then the number of complaints will be reduced because the majority of the complaints come from a small fraction of police officers. Our theme is to challenge the assumption that the number of allegations is a reliable metric to flag a police officer as “bad apple”. Our purpose is to remind the readers that we are not in the shoes of the police officers, that they sometimes risk their lives performing duties that a less courageous one would shy away from and that it would require extreme caution to judge them and their work based on numbers from a spreadsheet, otherwise we do not pay our due respect.

The theory that advocates intervention on repeaters made another assumption that the personal traits of the police officer are the driving cause for a complaint, not the situation and environment. This assumption is problematic because personality can change based on past experience. For example, officers who are placed in a crime-prone neighborhood can become aggressive and violent not necessarily because of their wish, but the intense environment. Even if these repeaters are removed, it is not guaranteed that other police officers will not become new repeaters once given the old repeaters’ tasks.

Another reason we think only using number of complaints to judge an officer is problematic because we don’t know the intention for one to file a complaint; ie. we don’t know whether they file a complaint just to reflect the truth, or serving their own benefit like a city payout, or just retaliating the officer who make them unhappy. On some occasions, the complaint is about an officer accidentally drops her taser; on other occasions, the complaint is about subject feelings such as “handcuffs are too tight”. We believe these complaints do not amount to the “badness” of a police officer.

However, our purpose is not to say that every cop is innocent of misconduct and that there is no room for improvement for the law enforcement agency. We aim to explore a collection of attributes associated with a police officer rather than focusing on a single one. In our work, we examined attributes such as awards, number of allegations, settlements that can possibly be used to evaluate the professionalism and integrity of an officer.