Scott M. Mourtgos

Scott M. Mourtgos

Assistant Professor

University of South Carolina

Scott M. Mourtgos is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina. His applied research focuses on policing and criminal justice policy. In particular, he is interested in public perceptions of police use-of-force, crime deterrence policies, police personnel issues, and the application of Bayesian statistics in criminal justice research. He has over twenty peer-reviewed publications on these and related topics, and his work has been published in the top general interest journals of both criminal justice and public administration, including Criminology, Justice Quarterly, and Public Administration Review. He is committed to integrating police practice with high-quality scientific evidence, an aim that is supported by his appointment as a 2020 NIJ LEADS Scholar. He also serves on the Research Advisory Board for the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), is an affiliate of the Police Staffing Observatory at Michigan State University, a member of the Police Accountability and Policy Evaluation Research (PAPER) lab at the University of South Carolina and University of Utah, and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Criminal Justice and Police Practice & Research: An International Journal.

His public-facing communication has appeared in multiple written, radio, and podcast outlets. He is a past doctoral fellow of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (2022), and an FBI National Academy graduate (Session 280), having served in various capacities in policing for two decades, including as a police executive.

Interests

  • Policing
  • Criminal Justice Policy
  • Bayesian Statistics
  • Text Analytics

Education

  • PhD Political Science

    University of Utah, 2024

  • MA in Forensic Psychology

    University of North Dakota, 2016

  • BSc in Criminal Justice

    Weber State University, 2004

  • Graduate Certificate in Criminal Justice Education

    University of Virginia, 2021

For inquiries, please contact Scott at smourtgos@gmail.com

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Featured Publications

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Do Deceptive Interrogation Bans Affect Case Resolution? Evidence from Juvenile Justice Reforms

Scott M. Mourtgos, Ian T. Adams

Crime & Delinquency (forthcoming) (2026)

This study examines whether state laws restricting deceptive interrogation tactics with juveniles reduce case resolution. Using NIBRS data from 2021-2024 and staggered adoption across nine states, we estimate effects on arrest clearances and prosecution-declined exceptional clearances for juvenile-involved serious offenses. Across Bayesian difference-in-differences, state-specific Bayesian synthetic control models, placebo tests, and robustness checks, arrest clearances do not decline after adoption within the study period. Estimates are null to modestly positive, including within individual treated states. Prosecution-declined clearances fall in treated states, but adult-offender placebo and triple-difference analyses show this pattern is not juvenile-specific. The findings suggest that juvenile deception restrictions do not impose a measurable system-level cost in case resolution.

If the face fits: predicting future promotions from police cadets' facial traits

Ian T. Adams, Scott M. Mourtgos, Christopher A. Simon, Nicholas P. Lovrich

Journal of Experimental Criminology (2023)

Can police cadets' facial traits predict whether they will be promoted in their careers? Using archival photographs of police cadets and machine learning-based facial analysis, we examine whether perceived facial traits (competence, dominance, attractiveness, trustworthiness) are associated with future career advancement. Our results suggest that perceived facial competence, but not other traits, is positively associated with promotion.

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Recent Posts

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Do Deceptive Interrogation Bans Affect Juvenile Case Resolution? Nine-State Results, Forthcoming in Crime & Delinquency

Nine states banned deceptive interrogation tactics for juveniles between 2022 and 2024, raising concerns among some that the tradeoff would be fewer cases solved. Across 510,582 juvenile-involved incidents in NIBRS (2021-2024), arrest clearances did not decline after adoption --- estimates are null to modestly positive across every method --- and prosecution declinations, the one measure that fell, fell for adults in the same states too.

juvenile justice interrogation deception bans NIBRS

Seeing Confessions Clearly: Why the Standard Score for Interrogation Methods Rewards Silence

For two decades, interrogation research has graded techniques with a single ratio: true confessions divided by false confessions. That ratio cannot tell the difference between a method that is better at separating guilty from innocent suspects and one that simply makes confessing harder for everyone. An interactive dashboard demonstrates the problem.

false confessions interrogation signal detection theory measurement

Interactive Dashboards

Did Banning Deceptive Interrogation Tactics Affect Juvenile Case Outcomes?

Nine states banned deceptive interrogation of juveniles, raising concerns among some that the tradeoff would be fewer cases solved. Across 510,582 juvenile-involved incidents (NIBRS 2021–2024), arrest clearances did not decline after adoption — and the drop in prosecution declinations is not juvenile-specific. Companion to Mourtgos & Adams (forthcoming), Crime & Delinquency.

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