One myth that I hear a lot despite the study they quote making a very different conclusion even in the year 1992 when it was conducted is that 40% of police officers beat their wives.
Even though they chose bad departments to sample from, the study actually showed that in 1 year in houses where they were living with a spouse, the rate of violence which was defined as a physical attack or threat with or without a weapon was- 8% for houses with one or more officers 6% for civilians, and 10% for veterans
Broken down further, this claim loses even more credibility as of the 8% finding which was concluded from both self reported and spouse reported cases of violence, the wife/girlfriend was the perpetrator 2/3 times. Given that today, 70% of LEO's are male, the claim is really falling apart.
A more recent study was made tracking crimes committed by LEO's in which a police officer was accused of a crime and charged between 2005-2011. The total number was 5,545 unique current (at the time) LEO'S charged with 6,724 crimes in that period of 2005-2011. In that time, there was an average of about 700,000 people working in the field of law enforcement each year.
Without taking into account how many people retired in that time, there are 104 officers for every 1 crime committed in that 6 or 7 year time period (unclear if they sampled the entire 2011 year or not). I'm comparing the crimes to the population since I can't get the number of unique arrests for civilians.
In 2005 alone not including drug offenses, 14,000,000 offenses were committed among the civilian population of 296M. So about one offense per 21 civilian in one year alone compared to one for 104 officers for every offense over 6-7 years.
Some may declare that they're covering up, to that I reply that civilians who conveniently don't have their every move under review are more likely to get away with a crime than officers who have internal affairs employees constantly watching their every move
