Where in the World is Cameron Sutton?

The NFL has a problem with crime. So do the rest of us.

Even if you are a rabid football fan, you would be forgiven if you had never heard of Cam Sutton before this month.  He isn’t a quarterback, and he has never been to the Pro Bowl.  For the past seven seasons, he has been a member of the NFL’s middle class: not a star, but able to reliably count on keeping a spot on the roster.  He has played for two teams, Pittsburgh and Detroit, so fans of those two teams are probably more likely to know him than anyone else.  He has never had more than three interceptions in a season, has a total of two sacks in his career, and topped out at 65 tackles in a year.  Solid, but not a guy who usually makes headlines. 

That all changed on March 20th of this year.

On that day, an arrest warrant was issued for Sutton in Tampa, Florida, for “domestic violence by strangulation.”  Then things got stranger, because he disappeared.  As of the time of writing this, Cam Sutton has not been located by law enforcement.  Perhaps the most diplomatic thing we can say is that we hope Sutton can be located soon, both for his own safety and the safety of others.  The alleged victim in the case probably doesn’t sleep particularly well, since the man whom she accused of domestic violence has not been accounted for.

I don’t have too much to say about Sutton, in particular, but his fugitive status will revive a frequent conversation among the talking heads.  In 2015, Forbes Magazine issued a breathless article entitled “The NFL's Violent Crime Problem,” and claimed that “Arrests for violence, drugs and DUI are fairly common even for elite NFL players who have the most to lose from an arrest and possible suspension from the league without pay.”  Bloomberg had a similar take just two years ago, saying “From sports betting to domestic violence to TV ratings to concussions, the league has a lot of room to improve.”

I’m not sure I’d disagree on two of those three points by Stephen L. Carter, but I do want to examine the middle one.  Does the NFL has a crime problem?

Given that every team in the NFL has a 53-man roster and there are 32 teams, that means that at any given time there are 1696 players in the modern NFL.  The actual population of the NFL changes almost daily, since players are routinely cut and promoted from the practice squad and so forth.  But it is a reasonable estimate for us to consider the population of NFL players to be about 1700.  For some reason, the USA Today keeps a database of NFL players’ legal troubles, so I can quote them as claiming that in 2023, the last year for which data is available, the number of NFL players charged with a crime was…drumroll please…two.  Von Miller of the Buffalo Bills was charged with felony assault relating to a domestic incident.  Dee Eskridge was charged with misdemeanor assault, also stemming from a domestic incident.  That’s all.  As a percentage of the total number of players in the NFL, that means that in 2023, the number of NFL players charged with crimes is roughly 0.12% of the total population.

Perhaps NFL players, who on average are better able to afford good lawyers than the general public, get charged less, even if they commit more crimes. Or perhaps the prosecutor’s office doesn’t want any part in ruining the home team’s defensive line, so they decline to press charges.  To avoid this problem, we could include arrests in the statistics, as well.  This reduces the overall reliability of the statistics, however, since arrests frequently do not result in criminal charges, regardless of who is involved, which in turn do not always lead to convictions.  The further we get from simply counting convictions, the less reliable our numbers become.  There are undoubtedly some innocent people getting swept up in these statistics.  But just for the sake of argument, let’s examine arrest records.  In 2023, there were 25 NFL players who were arrested, charged with a crime, issued a citation, or indicted.  This means the crime rate among NFL players skyrockets to 1.47% of the population.

By contrast, the number of arrests in the U.S. population in 2022, the last year for which I have statistics, was  2,181.7 arrests per 100,000 of the population.  This means that about 2.18% of the general U.S. population were arrested or charged with a crime. 

The NFL crime rate was not always quite this low.  The USA Today database reports 41 in 2000, for instance.  There were only 31 teams then, and the roster limit was 45, so the population was 1395, which would lead to a crime rate of 2.94%.  Yet even this doesn’t represent an increase relative to the national crime rate, since back then there were 4,953 arrests per 100,000 citizens, which is a rate of 4.95%.  So no matter how you slice it, football players are involved in fewer crime reports than the general public.

So why do we think of football players as having such violent private lives?  I can only speculate here, but I would suggest that a big part of it is that when your next-door neighbor, gets collared for wife-beating, it doesn’t make the headlines on SportsCenter.  Also, we perceive of football players as violent, since they play a violent sport, and experience confirmation bias on the occasions that we here about NFL players being caught up in something nefarious.

Now, do I want to minimize the extent of the damage that is caused when an NFL player engages in domestic violence? Absolutely not.  I want to be very clear on that point.  There is also a legitimate argument to be made that a violent incident involving a football player is inherently a bigger deal than when someone else commits the same act.  An act of aggression from someone who is literally trained in the most effective way of grabbing someone who is trying to flee and hurling them to the ground is a very dangerous thing, indeed.  Yes, there are plenty of meatheads in the public who work out and are big and strong, but we have to accept the fact that the prospect of being tackled by a NFL lineman while wearing any padding is a genuinely terrifying prospect. 

Is football a violent sport?  Sure.  Are football players violent people?  Some are, but then again so are some barbers, lawyers and hairdressers. 

The NFL doesn’t have a problem with violent crime.  Our country does, and NFL players are merely emblematic of our failures to protect the most vulnerable members of our society.