Police Corruption is defined as the abuse of police authority for personal or organizational gain. This comes in many shapes and sizes, from the major drug trafficking and money laundering to looking the other way on minor everyday violations of the law. Ever since the concept of rules and regulation came about there have been certain people who were chosen to enforce those regulations. Some of those law enforcement personnel have been persuaded to look the other way on certain violations committed by their friends or family. Payments for these inconsistencies could come in the way of personal favors, bribes, or gratuities. Other corruption activities involve more serious crimes such as brutality, drugs, and framing of suspects (Schmalleger, 2003, pp. 227-229).
Police corruption is a complex phenomenon, which does not readily submit to simple analysis. It is a problem that has and will continue to affect us all, whether we are civilians or law enforcement officers. Since its beginnings, may aspects of policing have changed; however, one aspect that has remained relatively unchanged is the existence of corruption. An examination of a local newspaper or any police-related publication on any given day will have an article about a police officer that got busted committing some kind of corrupt act. Police corruption has increased dramatically with the illegal cocaine trade, with officers acting alone or in-groups to steal money from dealers or distribute cocaine themselves. Large groups of corrupt police have been caught in New York, New Orleans, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles.
Corruption can be broken down into two sections, internal and external corruption. Internal corruption is the illegal acts and agreements within a police department by more than one of the officers. External corruption is the illegal acts and agreements with the public by one or more officers in a department. For a corrupt act to occur, three distinct elements of police corruption must be present simultaneously: 1) misuse of authority, 2) misuse of official capacity, and 3) misuse of personal attainment. It can be said that power inevitably tends to corrupt, and it is yet to be recognized that, while there is no reason to suppose that policemen as individuals are any less fallible than other members of society, people are often shocked and outraged when policemen are exposed violating the law. The reason is simple. There deviance elicits a special feeling of betrayal. Most studies support the view that corruption is endemic, if not universal, in police departments. The danger of corruption for police, and this is that it may invert the formal goals of the organization and may lead to "the use of organizational power to encourage and create crime rather than to deter it. General police deviance can include brutality, discrimination, sexual harassment, intimidation, and illicit use of weapons. However it is not particularly obvious where brutality, discrimination, and misconduct end and corruption begin. The external corruption generally consists of one ore more of the following activities:
1) Payoffs to police by essentially non-criminal elements who fail to comply with stringent statutes or city ordinances; (for example, individuals who repeatedly violate traffic laws).
2) Payoffs to police by individuals who continually violate the law as a method of making money (for example, prostitutes, narcotics addicts and pushers, & professional burglars).
3) "Clean Graft" where money is paid to police for services, or where courtesy discounts are given as a matter of course to the police.
Police officers have been involved in activities such as extortion of money and/or narcotics from narcotics violators in order to avoid arrest; they have accepted bribes; they have sold narcotics. They have known of narcotics have entered into personal associations with narcotics criminals and in some cases have used narcotics. They have given false testimony in court in order to obtain dismissal of the charges against a defendant. A scandal is perceived both as a socially constructed phenomenon and as an agent of change that can lead to realignments in the structure of power within organizations. New York, for instance, has had more than a half dozen major scandals concerning its police department within a century. It was the Knapp Commission in 1972 that first brought attention to the NYPD when they released the results of over 2 years of investigations of alleged corruption.
Last edited by section9 (2006-01-23 14:17:16)