Pros and Cons Read Free Page B

the NFL about due process. Why? Because gambling, like steroids, gives the image of an artificial on-field product, which has a direct correlation to, as Aiello said, the “business” of the NFL. Violent crime, on the other hand, apparently does not.
    Together, the 109 players who showed up in the authors’ survey with a criminal history had been arrested a combined 264 times. That’s an average of 2.42 arrests per player.
    Keep in mind that the 264 arrests involve only the most serious offenses. Although the authors discovered a substantial number of players who had been charged with minor misdemeanors (credit card theft, shoplifting, urinating in public, disturbing the peace, etc.) and traffic offenses (speeding and driving with a suspended license), none of these offenses are included in the authors’ statistics. The intent was to deal strictly with the more serious criminals in the NFL and the very serious crimes they commit.
    A breakdown of the 264 arrests shows:
    2 for homicide
    7 for rape
    4 for kidnapping
    45 for domestic violence
    42 for aggravated assault/assault and battery (nondomestic violence cases)
    25 for other crimes against persons, including robbery and armed robbery
    15 for drug crimes, including intent to distribute cocaine, possession of cocaine, and possession of marijuana
    32 for crimes against property, including fraud, larceny, burglary, theft, and property destruction
    35 for driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs
    17 for resisting arrest
    40 for other public safety crimes, including illegal use or possession of a weapon and trespassing. (Note: Trespassing was included only when connected to a domestic violence complaint or an incident involving multiple defendants where someone was charged with a more serious offense.)
    As astonishing as these numbers are, it may well be only the tip of the iceberg, albeit an iceberg of
Titanic
proportions. Challenges posed by restrictive public access laws, a near-complete block-out of juvenile criminal records, and the transient nature of NFL players made it impossible to have a complete accounting of all NFL players’ criminal histories.
    For example, Oakland Raiders running back Derrick Fenner, who is among the 509 players whose history was checked by the authors, was charged with murder in 1987 in Washington, D.C. (He was ultimately exonerated.) This arrest does not show up in the authors’ statistics because the District of Columbia is not among the jurisdictions that provided criminal history records to the authors.
    In all, the authors discovered over fifty additional players whose criminal histories
as adults
included serious crimes. But these players were
not
included in the authors’ statistics because their crimes were discovered by methods that failed to meet the strict standard set for inclusion in the database, as explained in the Authors’ Note. (In other words, records checks were done in only one state or in a state where the players resided for less than five years.)
    Put simply, the number of crimes (264) and criminals (109) recorded here are conservative.
    H ave you done a study asking how many serious crimes are committed by a group of 1,700 lawyers or 1,700 plumbers?” asked Aiello, when contacted by the authors for this book. “How are you supposed to know if this [21 percent of the players formally charged with serious crimes] is unusual?”
    Yes, all this data begs the question: Are professional athletes in general or NFL players in particular more prone to criminal behavior than the general population? The answer depends on who you compare them to. If you compare them to their ethnic, demographic, and economic “peers”—adult males under thirty-two who have completed college and earn at least six-figure salaries (of the 509 players in the survey, all earn over $150,000 per year—the minimum salary in the NFL—and most earn considerably more, and virtually all attended four years of college)—NFL players would