Officer misconduct costs agencies and communities resources every year and erodes public trust by damaging police-community relations. A critical accountability mechanism to prevent the phenomenon of officers fired for misconduct from being rehired by other agencies is the process of police decertification. Decertifications are the revocation of an officer’s certification by state law procedure, after which no agency in the state can hire a decertified individual legally. This analysis presents a comprehensive descriptive comparison and overview of police decertification laws across all 50 U.S. states, examining their scope, restrictiveness, and other correlates as of June 2025. While all states except Rhode Island have some form of decertification system, only 38% codify these procedures in statutes, while the majority rely on administrative codes. The study identifies substantial variation in decertifiable conduct, assessing eleven types of misconduct decertifiable by the law, ranging from felony convictions decertifiable in 97.92% of states to broader categories like unprofessional conduct decertifiable in 79.17% states and dishonesty, which is decertifiable in 77.08%. Around 47.9% of states maintain narrow, while 16.7% adopt expansive standards. Despite these frameworks, enforcement gaps persist, and only 27.08% of states expressly penalize agencies for failing to report misconduct in their laws, and 45.83% allow recertification, though most recertifications are conditional. The implications of this comparative analysis are examined, and the results are discussed.
Riti Dwivedi (Wed,) studied this question.