In 2023, Peter Cassino, director of graduate studies and assistant professor of practice in criminology and criminal justice, found a golden opportunity for new research.
As part of a sweeping reform effort, The Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commission released a public database on all officer disciplinary records.
“Other studies looked at how changes to policies prevent use of force and deadly force, justifiable or not,” he explained. “However, a lot of that is legal. To me, it didn’t tell how reforms affected confirmed misconduct. It just talked about conduct.”
He began combing the records to see if recent reform measures had an impact on confirmed officer misconduct cases. The results were published in the Journal of Criminal Justice the following year. In a nutshell, Cassino found that verified misconduct cases went down after reforms were put in place.
“It wasn’t one-day flukes either,” he explained. “It went down and stayed down during the study period. Through this analysis, we are able to say with at least 95% confidence that this change is due to the reforms.”
Cassino’s report, “The effect of police reform on overall police misconduct and misconduct that involves the use of force,” will be introduced to Merrimack College’s Tolle Lege collection this year, which catalogs all published material written by Merrimack students, faculty and staff.
“One of the biggest criticisms is the accuracy of the data,” he continued. “People suggest the vast majority of misconduct never gets documented. That very well might be true. But considering what is documented actually happened, it doesn’t make the data bad. It might mean that a lot is missing. But you can still see even with a smaller sample if the trend is statistically significant or not.”
The McQuade Library, who oversees the collection, also selected Cassino to represent the School of Education and Social Policy as a featured speaker at this year’s Tolle Lege celebration.
“It’s no secret that Merrimack is seeing its future as a research university,” Cassino said. “To be recognized as part of that is awesome.”
Cassino’s recent research has pertained to COVID-19-era policing. Specifically, he published studies on how the pandemic shaped use of force incidents and how CARES Act affected crime rates.
“After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, some people wanted to go to the extreme of defunding the police,” Cassino said. “A lot of places including Massachusetts reacted by passing new laws that restricted police behavior and enacted new oversight ”
In addition, Massachusetts began certifying police officers.
“It’s common in lots of places but it’s new to this state,” Cassino explained. “It made it easier for people or other officers who notice misconduct to say something and do something about it. It also gave clearer punishments for those who violate the standards.”
