Pros and Cons (41 page)

(Left to right)
Vikings head coach Dennis Green, assistant coaches Richard Solomon and Carl Hargrave, and team president and CEO Roger Headrick. The Vikings coaching staff was embroiled in controversy following sexual harassment accusations. (Photos courtesy of the Minnesota Vikings)

Former Minnesota Vikings running back Keith Henderson was convicted of sexually assaulting three women in a nine-month span. (Eden Prairie, Minnesota, Police Department photo)

Indianapolis Colts star defensive lineman Tony McCoy. While at the University of Florida, McCoy was charged in a nine-count felony indictment. All charges were later dropped. (Alachua County, Florida, Sheriff’s Office photo)

Former Bengals defensive back Lewis Billups (#24) served time in a federal prison after making threats against NBA player Rex Chapman and his sister Jenny Chapman. Billups also pleaded guilty after being indicted for sexually assaulting a Florida woman while another man videotaped the incident. (Photo courtesy of the Cincinnati Bengals)

Former Rams cornerback Darryl Henley (seen here carrying the ball) was convicted for soliciting the murder of a federal judge and Rams cheerleader who testified against him. Henley is currently serving 41 years in Marion Federal Prison in Illinois. (Photo courtesy of the St.Louis Rams)

Acknowledgments

The amount of time required to research this book called for tremendous sacrifice and patience on the part of our families. First and foremost, we thank them for their support.

Nor could the research have been as thorough without the hard work and efficiency of a core of young research assistants J.R. Mastri-oanni, an able and efficient researcher, tracked down hundreds of pages of background information on players. And Ron Cochran, a graduating senior at Northeastern University, worked with the authors to design and maintain the computerized index of all the NFL players and their crimes. Craig Ball and Charity and Rachel Benedict spent hours visiting courthouses and retrieving court documents.

Our agent, Basil Kane, was a source of inspiration from the outset.

Editor Rick Wolff was absolutely great to work alongside. His associates at Warner Books were likewise a pleasure to collaborate with: Rob McMahon, Emi Battaglia, Madeleine Schachter, and Julie Salt-man. And a special thanks to Elizabeth McNamara.

One of the authors is particularly grateful to his classmates at the New England School of Law who helped him get through his second year of law school while writing this book. Bill Byrne, Ray Woeffler, and Detective John Whiting of the Pawtucket Police Department, thank you. And most notably, Jeff Tomlinson, a true friend who will make a far better lawyer than the author.

Countless law enforcement agencies provided the authors access to their facilities and granted exceptional amounts of time for questioning. Not all are mentioned here, but a few are: the Drug Interdiction Task Force in Rockwall, Texas; the Drug Enforcement Agency in East St. Louis; the U.S. Justice Department; the Sex Crimes Unit at the Buffalo Police Department; the University of Florida Police Department; the Seattle Police Department; the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office in Gainesville, Florida; the Lincoln, Nebraska, Police Department; the Rockwall County District Attorney’s Office; the Dade County Police Department; the Fulton County Sheriff’s Department; the Seminole County Prosecutor’s Office; the Chatham County District Attorney’s Office in Savannah, Georgia; the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office in Seattle; the Office of the State Attorney in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; the Tarrant County [Texas] District Attorney’s Office; the North Royalton Police Department, the Eden Prairie Police Department, the Bloomington Police Department, and the Minneapolis Police Department, all in Minnesota; the University of Arkansas Police Department; the Washington County Prosecutor’s Office in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Records clerks from across the country were most helpful to us. There are too many to name individually, but a few who donated a particular amount of their time on our behalf include: Marti Maxwell at the Municipal Court of Seattle, three police records clerks at the Minneapolis, Eden Prairie, and Bloomington, Minnesota police departments, Vallerie at the Fulton County Superior Court, Lieutenant Mann at the Sex Crimes Unit in the Buffalo Police Department, and the folks at the University of Florida Police Department.

We are appreciative of the time given to us by members of the President’s Domestic Violence Council. Also, the NFL Players Association, Empower America, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, and members of the United States House and Senate.

Jack McDevitt and Donald Cochran, professors at the Northeastern University College of Criminal Justice, were instrumental in helping design the methodology for our research. And Professor Alfred Blumstein at Carnegie Mellon was a source of guidance.

Appendix I

After the authors completed their research for this book, the statistical data were turned over to Carnegie Mellon University Professor Alfred Blumstein for analysis. In return, he provided the authors a seven-page report. “This selection criterion [used by the authors],” he wrote, “should be independent of whether any individual had an arrest history, and so the sample can be seen as reasonably representative of the players in the NFL.” In sum, the statistics generated by the authors are both valid and representative of the NFL population.

In light of the challenges posed by trying to find a similarly situated group of adult males to compare NFL players to for the purpose of statistical analysis (see Authors’ Note), Professor Blumstein compared the arrest rates of blacks and whites in the general population to the arrest rates of blacks and whites in the NFL. It is important to understand that this comparison does not take into account other socioeconomic factors such as income or education level attained. The only factor that Professor Blumstein controlled for was race.

Also, it is important to understand that the arrest rates comparisons between blacks and whites in the general population to blacks and whites in the NFL are based only on the crime of assault. Due to arrests for assault being the most commonly reported crime involving NFL players, this crime was selected for comparison with arrests for assault in the general population.

A Summary of Alfred Blumstein’s Report

Jeff Benedict and Don Yaeger have collected an intriguing array of information about the adult criminal arrest records of the men who populate the NFL. They drew a reasonably representative sample of the players, and found that 21 percent of them had experienced an arrest for something more serious than a minor brush with the law. This number sounds very high, and so raised for them the question of how unusual this arrest experience may be. They were interested in having some assessment of this level of arrest experience, and they contacted me to explore that issue.

I started the inquiry by harking back to some estimates Elizabeth Graddy and I had made in 1981. We calculated that the chance that a male in a U.S. city of 250,000 population or more (reasonably representative of NFL cities) would be arrested some time in his life for one of the seven “index” crimes (homicide, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny/theft, or motor vehicle theft) was rather high—23 percent—with the likelihood varying considerably between the races, 51 percent for blacks and 14 percent for whites. That estimate includes arrests as a juvenile, where most people experience their first arrests. The NFL data does
not
include juvenile arrests.

ESTIMATION OF RATES FOR VIOLENT CRIMES

Benedict and Yaeger reported that they had data on 509 NFL players and that 109 of those players had accumulated one or more serious arrests, for a total of 264 arrests.

Perhaps the most interesting crimes attributed to the NFL players are the “violent assaults,” those designated as assaults (both domestic violence and other assaults). Here we have a population of men who earn outstanding incomes based on their skill and readiness to engage in vigorous albeit regulated assault with opponents on the football field, and so it is of some interest to see to what extent they exploit those particular skills in other situations where the ground rules are quite different.

The numbers for these two kinds of offenses are quite close: 31 players were arrested for each of those offenses, with a total of 42 arrests for assault and 45 for domestic violence. Using these numbers, I calculated the rates at which those events occur. The rate of arrest for assault in the U.S. population varies across racial groups considerably, with the rate for blacks being about three times that for whites, and so it is important to examine the arrest rates for assault by NFL players separately by racial groups. This is particularly important because the race mix in the NFL sample is very different from that in the general population: blacks comprised 78 percent of those identified as black or white.
^*
Thus, of the 399 black players in the sample, 96 of them (24 percent) had an arrest for something; of the 93 whites in the sample, 8 of them (8 percent) had an arrest.

Information was unavailable on the race of the particular players arrested for assault, and so we assume that the race of players charged with assault is similar to the total arrest distribution, yielding an estimated 77.43 total assault arrests for blacks and 5.5 for whites. Dividing these total estimated arrests by the number of players in each group provides an estimate of the total assault rate of 19,406 per 100,000 population (the population base normally used for arrest-rate calculation) for the black players and 5,729 per 100,000 population for the white players. But these NFL players accumulated these rates over several years, approximately four years of college and three years in the NFL, so that we can calculate an average
annual
rate by dividing by 7. Thus, the average annual rate of arrest for assault per 100,000 population is 3,006 for black players (just over 3 percent) and 951 for white players (1 percent).