Police Corruption :: Law Enforcement Corruption

Police corruption is a complex phenomenon, which does notreadily 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 ofpolicing pee changed however, one aspect that has remained relatively unchanged is theexistence of corruption. An examination of a local newspaper or any police-related publicationon any given day will have an article about a police officer that got busted committing round kindof corrupt act. Police corruption has increased dramatically with the illegal cocaine trade, withofficers acting alone or in-groups to steal money from dealers or air cocaine themselves.Large groups of corrupt police have been caught in New York, New Orleans, Washington,DC, and Los Angeles. Methodology Corruption within police departments falls into 2 canonicalcategories, which are external corruption and internal corruption. In this report I will concentrateonly on ex ternal corruption because it has been the larger common snapping turtle of attention recently. I havedecided to include the fairly recent accounts of corruption from a few major cities, mainly NewYork, because that is where I have lived for the past 22 years. I compiled my schooling fromnumerous articles written in the New York Times over the last 5 years. My definitionalinformation and background data came from various books cited that have been written on theissue of police corruption. Those books helped me create a basis of just what the different typesof corruption and deviancies are, as well as how and why corruption happens. The books werefilled with useful insight but were not update enough, so I relied on the newspaper articles toprovide me with the current, and regional information that was needed to complete this report.In simple terms, corruption in policing is usually viewed as the misuse of authority by a policeofficer acting officially to fulfill personal needs or w ants. For a corrupt act to occur, three distinctelements of police corruption must be save simultaneously 1) misuse of authority, 2) misuseof official capacity, and 3) misuse of personal attainment. (Dantzker, 1995 p 157) It can besaid that power inevitably tends to corrupt, and it is yet to be accepted that, while there is noreason to suppose that policemen as individuals are any less fallible than other members ofsociety, people are often floor and outraged when policemen are exposed violating the law.The reason is simple. There deviance elicits a special feeling of betrayal. Most studies support