NFL Players Have a Lower Arrest Rate than the Public

Not Everybody in the Media is Racist Thanks to Brent Schrotenboer!

Professional football players are out of control. With more money than maturity, they’re more likely than the general public to drive drunk, get into barroom fights and generally act like thugs, hoodlums and common criminals.

Right?

Wrong.

Every once in a while, a reporter will take a step back from the conventional wisdom and check it against the facts. That’s what the San Diego Union-Tribune’s Brent Schrotenboer did last week.

For a two-part series, “NFL Crime and Punishment,” he analyzed 308 arrests and citations of National Football League players since 2000 and found:

* The overall arrest rate for football players is about half of the general population. In any given year, about one in 45 NFL players — a little more than one per roster — gets arrested. The national rate is about one in 23, according to the FBI. [78]
* Drunken driving arrests accounted for a third of the arrests. Still, the drunken driving arrest rate is about one in 144 for NFL players — slightly better than the national rate of one in 135.
* Fifty players were responsible for 40 percent of arrests, with multiple DUI and other charges.

Schrotenboer then goes looking for answers about the nature of the problem, and why the perception is different from reality. His experts come up with the usual suspects: the media, society, racism, the “car culture,” a lack of personal responsibility, poor upbringings.