UNTITLED
The topic of my resaerch paper is going to be about Police Corruption. I am eaither going to be talking about drug related issues, sexism and racism or I will be talking about one of these issues related to the external and internal police corruption.
LITERATURE REVIEW
1. Richard H. Ward- Managing Police Corruption
2. Thomas Baker- Police Deviance
3. Leslie Roger- Police Corruption
4. Randy Cohen- Cheating Cops New York Times Magazine
5. Marvin Mentor- Prison Legal News
6. Tamara Roleff- Police Corruption
7. Dana Canedy- Ex-Miami Officers Testifies
8. Anonoymous(author)- Police Department Disciplinary Bulletin 9. Sanja Kutrijak
Ivkovic- Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 10. David Bayley- Criminology
and Public Policy
11. Robert Kane Criminolgy
In society today stories of police corruption are cover page news; they draw public attention and sell newspapers. Police abuse remains one of the most serious and divisive human rights violations in the United States. The excessive use of force by police officers, including unjustified shootings, severe beatings, fatal choking and rough treatment, persists because overwhelming restraint to accountability make it possible for officers who commit human rights violations to escape due punishment and often to repeat their offenses. Police corruption has become one of the most talked about topics in big cities like Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington DC just to name a few. Now we just need to find out why it is such a big topic.
Police or public officials greet each new report of brutality with denials or explain that the act was an abnormality, while the administrative and criminal system that should discourage these abuses by holding officers accountable instead practically guarantee them privilege. Even the most honorable peace officers are unavoidably forced into adhering to a code of silence concerning wrongdoing. There have been so many cases that police officers get off the hook for because everyone in the company is practicing police brutality. In one case there was a young African-American boy that was stopped just because he looked suspicious.
After an acquaintance was mugged, the apparent perpetrator, an African American youngster, was promptly caught near the scene with the victim’s belongings. At the station the (white) acquaintance heard a (white) detective say that the young man was stopped simply for appearing suspicious (i.e., being black and running down the street in a white neighborhood in the wee hours). Only after he was in custody did the officers hear his description on the police radio. The detective instructed the officer to report that they heard the description before detaining him.
This situation here shows how wrong white police officers treat young African American men. Also how they would put other officers in jeopardy of losing their jobs to for lying for them. There have been many other incidents that have occurred but officers are actually getting punished for them. A jury convicted four former Miami police officers of conspiracy charges but returned with mixed verdicts for seven other defendants in a federal trail that exposed corruption in some of the most prominent police shootings in Miami’s recent history. The former officers were charged with conspiring to plant guns on unarmed suspects, misleading investigators about their actions and lying under oath in a vast cover-up. Another case in Miami was with five officers who were acquainted of wrongdoing in the most well known shooting, that of Richard Brown, 73, who died in a shower of 123 bullets as his 14 year old granddaughter hid in a bathroom. The jury charged the five officers but not all of them with obstruction of justice, conspiracy and perjury. Can these actions by police offices who are suppose to serve and protect us keep doing this to innocent people? I think not that’s why a recent study has occurred by Sanja Kutnjak Ivkovic. He did a study on the extent and nature of police corruption and provides a comprehensive analysis of the existing methods for corruption measurement. The first part is the Problem at the Outset.
I. Problem at the Outset
First, in the course of measuring police corruption, it is crucial to define what corruption is. Unfortunately in most countries legal statutes do not feature a crime specifically titled “corruption.” Even if it were not so, the definition would probably vary at least as much as the definitions of other crimes across the world do. Behavior typically understood as “corruption” is classified as bribery and extortion but depending on the legal system it may be defined as theft, fraud and tax evasion. Some countries may not even define some of these acts as criminal at all. Similarly, what corrupt behavior is prohibited by agency to agency and across time within the agency? Thus, as challenging as measuring corruption in a given agency at a given time, undoubtfully is making any comparisons across space and time is inherently even more difficult and riddled with problems that render any resulting conclusions questionable and tentative at best.
Second, further dissecting the measurement of police corruption, it turns out that defining who the police are is by no means less challenging. Indeed even some of the basic questions as who is included in the definition of police and how many police agencies and police officers there are, remain controversial. For example, the U.S. police force is highly decentralized, ranging in geographic jurisdiction from federal and state to local and in subject jurisdiction from general jurisdiction police to park, university or transit police all the way to the most recent private police. Which of these police agencies should be classified under “police” is a challenging question. For example, while the President’s Commission estimated that there were 40,000 state and local police agencies in the United States in 1965, the Department of Justice reported that there were only 20,000 police agencies in the United States in 1980.
The logical source of information about corruption, not surprisingly are the people who know about it: police officers, citizens, police organizations and investigative agencies. The pivotal question and the third problem to be considered at the outset, is what motivation would someone have to publicly reveal such information be they have a participant in a corrupt transaction or an administrator in an agency?
Obtaining information about corruption or gaining access to study corruption in an agency will likely be burdened with serious obstacles imposed by a variety of key players – the police officers, union, chief, supervisor—whose agendas, although dissimilar in many aspects and motivated by different incentives, may converge in information about corruption as possible and generally, keeping the lid on the existing corrupt activities within the agency.
Generally, reports about corruption, if at all noticed by the public, may lead toward a scandal. When fueled by the “bad apple” approach toward police corruption and zero-tolerance attitudes, public reactions to a scandal often both generate requests for harsher punishments and challenge the leadership’s ability to manage the agency. In such a climate, funding of corruption are perceived almost exclusively as detrimental signs of the agency’s lack of integrity. Thus, police chiefs and police administration have strong reasons for their reluctance to talk about police corruption: it may be more rational for the chief and the administration to sweep corruption under the rug rather than confront it publicly, deny its existence its for as long as possible and once corruption is discovered, downly its extent and importance as much as possible and swiftly punished a few officers publicly accused of emerging in corrupt acts “bad apples.”
Police officer, bound by the nature of their occupation and the paramilitary structure of the police, learn during the socialization process that they need to turn a blind eye on misconduct by fellow police officers, which in turn enables them to rely on their assistance when they need it, and to earn their trust and support. Regardless of how severe and extensive the actual consequences of the violation of the code of silence are and what is actually covered by the code in an agency, the code seems to be shared by police officers willingness to report misconduct by fellow police officers. Such a state of affairs should not be surprising in light of the fact that, as is the case with any other self-report studies, questioned asked of police officers about their own criminality of others, if answered truthfully and later revealed, can entail serious ramifications, ranging from internal discipline to convictions on felony charges.
Consequently, studying police corruption by asking police officers about the extent and nature of corruption in their agencies is more than likely to encounter resistance. A revealing example is the survey of attendee at the FBI National Academy, one of the most prestigious police academies in the United States. Under a guarantee of confidentiality, a question in the survey asked of the respondents very experienced police officers, mostly supervisors from a number of agencies across the United Stated – to provide “specific examples of graft or corruption in (their) department, without revealing names or places and what they think could have been done t prevent it. None of the 49 respondents provided an answer.
Similarly to police officers, who do not have any motivation to report their own lucrative and successful corrupt activities, citizens who offered a bribe when caught violating the law are unlikely later to report the incident. If a citizen made a rational decision that it is better—in terms of finances, reputation and emotional costs—to bribe a police officer than to be officially processed, the citizen has no reason to charge that decision and to expose their own involvement in not one, but two crimes, corruption probably being the more serious of the two. On the other hand a citizen who perceived being forced into such an arrangement and being worse off than in the absence of it may have a stronger motivation to disclose the transaction. However, the motivation to report in itself is not a sufficient prerequisite for the subsequent behavior; the force or abuse of official position by the police displayed or threatened during the transaction and the possible retribution for reporting may prompt the citizen to be even more reluctant to report.
Thus, those who know corruption – from police officers and citizens who directly participate in corrupt transactions to police chief and administrators who are accountable for the conduct of their subordinates—have very few motives to make public the information about corrupt acts they come across. In fact, they have a diversified palette of motives to conceal any such information as much as possible.
The secretive nature of corrupt transactions and the lack of incentives to release information about them render obtaining accurate measurements -- the actual number of corrupt incidents and offenders and the actual losses arising from corruption – a very difficult task. The practical impossibility of measuring the true extent and nature of corruption on the one hand and the pressing need to obtain the relevant information on the other hand have prompted social scientists to develop various methods of estimating the true extent and nature of corruption: surveys, experiments, case studies, interviews, and observations.
Unfortunately, regardless of its sophistication when applied to the measurement of the extent of corruption each of these methods in itself is burdened with inherent methodological problems. Thus, the quality of the research design and the limitations of each method have a material impact on the outcome; the higher the internal and external validity of the method, the greater the probability that the resulting estimated are closer to the true extent and nature of corruption. One approach toward enhancing the likelihood that the obtaining estimates are a close approximation of the actual corruption is triangulation the use of several different methods. Indeed, while much of the existing research relied on one method, independent commission and a few large research projects tended to use a combination of methods.
Another approach toward enhancing the accuracy of the findings, applied in survey methodology and qualitative studies, is to use more than one category of respondents for example not only surveying police officers, but citizens as well. For expository convenience he organized the discussion around the methods and the studies that employed them.
Figure 1 illustrates the levels at which corruption could be measured, starting with the actual extent and nature of corruption (bottom of figure 1) and ending with the offenders sent to prison (top of figure 1). Although the true level of corruption should be measured at the lowest level – all possible corrupt activities and offenders—potentially useful information can also be obtained by estimating corruption at various stages of the internal disciplinary system and the criminal justice system.
A. SURVEYS
1. Survey of Police Officers
Surveys that ask police officers to report their own involvement in corruption or that of their fellow officers are rare because it is not only very difficult to gain access to police agencies, secure their participation and earn the trust of the police officers, but it is also evident that the validity of the data obtained in such a way is doubtful at best. Police officers have no incentives to report their own corrupt activities and thus risk losing their job and/or facing prosecution in criminal courts. Moreover, since they are accepted members of the police subculture and are likely to share and support the code of silence, they have no motive to report misconduct by their fellow officers either, even if guaranteed confidentiality or anonymity by the researchers.
Not surprisingly, because of the potential problems related to validity and the challenges related to defining corruption and the police, there is no survey, national or international, that could ascertain, for example, whether “fewer police officers have reported this year that they have engaged in corruption than they did last year” or whether “the percentage of police officers in the Northeast reported that they engaged in corruption is smaller than in the South. A recently released summary of the Police Foundation survey, described by its authors as provided “the first national portrait of police attitudes toward the abuse of authority,” contains no questions about the frequency of corruption.
A few surveys of police officers inquired about the frequency of corruption in their agencies. The challenges of asking police officers to violate the code of silence are illustrated by a Department of Justice study of police behavior. The original grant to the Ohio Governor’s Office of Criminal Justice Services was expanded to include the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority and the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, but the Fraternal Order of Police in Pennsylvania strongly pressured police officers not to participate. Consequently, the study was aborted in Pennsylvania before it even began. Similarly, the Fraternal Order of Police in Chicago decided not to endorse the Illinois project in Chicago, forcing the researchers approximately one-half of the full- time municipal police force in Illinois – from the project.
The Illinois study was based on a stratified random sample of municipal police officers (N=861). The respondents were asked to report what types of misconduct they most commonly observed during the past year and during their whole career. The frequency of perceived forms of corruption seemed to be related to their seriousness: fewer than 0.4% of the respondents said that they saw a police officer accepting a bribe, stealing property, or purchasing stolen merchandise in the past year, while 81% of the police officers said that they saw a police officers said that they saw a police officer accepting free coffee or food from a restaurant. The socialization process and the participation in the code of silence had a strong impact on the frequency with which the respondents reported observing corruption: police officers with less than one year of experience were more likely to say that they had witnessed a police officer accepting free coffee or food in the past year than the more experience police officer (especially those with more than sixteen years of service).
The corruption- related results of the Ohio study were quite similar to the findings of the Illinois study: a representative sample of Ohio police officers reported observing serious types of police corruption while they reported observing police officers accepting free coffee or food from restaurants quite frequently 71% observed it over the course of the previous twelve months; 87.3% observed it during their careers.
Given the sampling techniques and the methodology, the results of the studies that managed to convince police officers to describe the extent of police corruption in their police agencies are thus at best limited to the population from these agencies. Consequently, in the absence of a representative sample, the results cannot be extended to other agencies or generalized to apply tot he whole police force, in a particular region or nation. Furthermore, the police officers answers, potentially impacted by the self-serving bias and the fear of drastic consequences for the violations of the code of silence, tend to point further away from the true rate of involvement in corruption.
2. Surveys of Citizens
Citizens, including the general public as well as specific segments of the public, are another source of data about corruption. Some of them have experienced corruption as participants, while others might have observed corrupt transactions by others. Analyzing aggregate answers about the citizens’ own involvement in corruption and especially, if possible, by comparing them with the police officers answers can yield a better estimate of the actual corruption.
The more recent surveys suggest that public still tends to have a relatively positive opinion about police honesty, while, at the same time, it perceives that police officers frequently engage in corruption. For example, a survey of citizens in Philadelphia in 1987 revealed that the public provided very positive rating of the police service despite the fact that one third of the respondents thought that police officers often took bribes. On the eve of one of the most recent corruption scandals New York, a New York Times poll in 1994 showed that, while 93% of the surveyed citizens perceived that one half of the surveyed citizens estimated that the police are doing a “good” or an “excellent” job. Another poll conducted in June of 1994 indicated that citizens had a more positive opinion about the average police officer in New York than about the New York Police Department as a whole: while 73% of the citizens stated that the average police officer was “very” or “someone honest,” 43% of the citizens perceived that there was widespread corruption in the Department. Once again, African-American and Hispanic citizens were more likely to say that corruption was widespread than Caucasian citizens were.
Overall, then, the results of citizens surveys provided quite a divergent picture about police corruption, from fewer than 2% of Caucasian respondents nationwide who perceived in the 1960’s that most of the police officers were corrupt, to 22% of respondents in California in the 1970’s who thought that there was at least some bribery of the police, to 93% of New Yorkers in the 1190’s who perceived corruption to be widespread.