InformalNetworks_SelectiveDisclosure_LE_Study

This study investigates whether informal social networks inside law enforcement and federal agencies share nonpublic or selectively framed information about civilians—such as prior arrests, mental-health crisis contacts, and protected personal details—across internal peer circles, interagency channels, and external networks in ways that produce measurable downstream social isolation for targeted individuals. Crucially, the study examines whether these informal disclosure practices and internal protection norms are facilitated, normalized, or legitimized by certain consulting psychologists, sociologists, and criminologists who advise, train, or sit on review boards for those agencies. The design is modeled directly on a retrospective longitudinal multilevel architecture (*N* = 480 unit-year observations across 24 stations/field offices over 5 operational years, encompassing 14,400 modeled operational/information-handling events), paired with *N* = 60 longitudinal case-study timelines and an explicit falsification log of *N* = 36 disconfirming/counterexample cases. This research does not diagnose individual officers, federal agents, or consultants, and explicitly avoids clinical-sounding labels. Instead, it operationalizes established constructs from criminology, industrial-organizational psychology, and organizational sociology.