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And a police officer in North Augusta, South Carolina, was indicted in August on a charge of misconduct in office after he shot a 68-year-old man who had failed to pull over for a traffic stop, and instead drove home.

It is difficult to generalize about why some cases lead to criminal charges, while others do not, but history shows that jurors may have less sympathy for officers who are guilty of more than just poor judgment during a crisis.

Police who get caught lying tend to get charged. So do those who use force to inflict punishment rather than to protect themselves, or who instigate physical confrontations for reasons that seem personal, rather than professional.

“If an officer goes rogue, really, and is acting personally, and not as an officer of the law, that’s when you’ll see a criminal charge,” said Candace McCoy, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Philip Matthew Stinson, a professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, who has been studying a database of 10,000 police arrests for various types of misconduct, said judges and juries are perfectly willing to throw the book at an officer – if they did something that went beyond their official duties, like robbing a drug dealer or using the authority of their badge to settle a personal score.

“If the jury is sitting there thinking, `Oh my God. A split-second decision like that? What would I have done? Would I have shot the guy?’ you’re not going to get an indictment,” he said.