Police Corruption in the United States - Essay Example

Farzeela Faisal Standard Academia Research Nov-19-2005 "Police Corruption In The United s" "Police corruption is not a new phenomenon in the US, but the types of cases and the conduct of the officers have gone through a transition over the past 20 years. The perception of police officers that they are not constrained by traditional moral values and that they need not adhere to the law creates confusion and leaves them searching for appropriate boundaries, but good ethics training can help to maintain integrity, morality and legality in law enforcement." (David Thompson, "Above the law", Law & Order. Wilmette: Jan 2001. Vol.49, Iss. 1, p. 77-79 3 pp.) Corruption, a societal dilemma which has always existed in our society, usually in the form of Police, has made us dumb and reticent to such an extent that we are uncertain enough to keep our eyes open, instead we are so used to close our eyes that it seems impossible to mention such a crucial suffering, and to let the department officers ruin the society and keep the abhorrence in the hearts of the people. Police corruption acts are increasing with the passage of time and everyday we comprehend and share our views regarding police unlawful acts, what is published in the newspaper. "In New Orleans, 11 police officers were convicted of accepting nearly $100,000 from undercover agents to protect a cocaine supply warehouse containing 286 pounds of cocaine. The undercover portion of the investigation was terminated when a witness was killed under orders from a New Orleans police officer." (General Accounting Office, Report to the Honorable Charles B. Rangel). Police departments participating in the five-year study were drawn from a pool of more than 4,000 police departments throughout the United States. Only sixty-nine supplied the necessary personality, background, and offense data and met all of the prerequisites for inclusion in the study (each had to administer a personality test to applicants and had to have had at least one incident where a screened officer engaged in a substantiated corrupt act, for example). Overall, the study examined 439 officers who had engaged in corrupt acts (such as bribes and information breaches) and 439 who had not. Police corruption exists in two forms: Internal corruption and External Corruption. Internal corruption refers to all those crimes, which are held within the boundaries of the police department, i.e., corruption that resides among policemen whereas External corruption escorts to those unlawful acts that apprehend police dealings with the public. Example of an Internal crime can be any officer who is involved in drug or cocaine violence along with other officers or staff or any officer who has taken excessive advantage over the authority given to him by harassing one of his colleague or member. A 1998 report by the General Accounting Office states, "The most commonly identified pattern of drug-related police corruption involved small groups of officers who protected and assisted each other in criminal activities, rather than the traditional patterns of non-drug-related police corruption that involved just a few isolated individuals or systemic corruption pervading an entire police department or precinct." (General Accounting Office, Report to the Honorable Charles B. Rangel) When we talk about external corruption, it is obvious to do something with public prosecution and it is a widespread predicament often found in our everyday lives. Example can be any police officer (or civilian) found engaged in the persuasion of common public. Like I have often observed in New York City, some cops take unnecessary advantage of wearing a five star badge uniform. As an example of police corruption, the GAO cites Philadelphia, where "Since 1995, 10 police officers from Philadelphia's 39th District have been charged with planting drugs on suspects, shaking down drug dealers for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and breaking into homes to steal drugs and cash." (General Accounting Office, Report to the Honorable Charles B. Rangel) The question, which comes to everyone, mind is why is there an unending series of corruption, why the impasse has risen to an extent that one can't even dare to think of an end to it. It seems like as if it is an endless panorama without any rupture. What are the factors that have causeed 'police corruption' to be in safe hands "When officers who are not the best candidates are hired during tight times, the entire police department can be in trouble. Trautman offers a checklist that is both a list of suggestions for preventing misconduct and a tool for conducting an ethics needs assessment." (Neal Trautman. "Corruption to increase dramatically", Law & Order. Wilmette: Apr 2002. Vol.50, Iss. 4, p. 121-124, 4 pp.) Some of the aspects I visualized after going through several columns are: When candidates are hired not because of their moral standards and strengths, but due to a factor of favourism. When ethical values are of no concern while selection. Lack of patriotism and personal interest, similarly lack of required qualification to qualify for the police tests. The only real, practically attainable protection against police interrogation abuses is to see to it that police are selected and promoted on a merit basis, that they are properly trained, adequately compensated, and that they are permitted to remain substantially free from politically inspired interference. In the hands of men of this competence, there will be a minimum degree of abusive practices. (Fred E Inbau. "Police interrogation-A practical necessity".) Learning how much corruption there is and understanding its characteristics are both basic yet crucial steps toward successful corruption control. Accurate information is necessary to diagnose the extent and nature of the corruption problem, trace the changes in its volume and patterns over time, determine the causes of corrupt behavior, learn about the susceptibility of various types of corrupt behavior to successful control, choose the required degree of interference, design adequate control strategies and mechanisms, estimate the resources necessary, determine the success of the techniques used, and monitor agency performance in corruption control over time. The history of ethical problems and corruption in American law enforcement is well documented. This study drew on cognitive development theory, applied specifically to the domains of moral and conceptual development, to create and implement an educational programme for police officer trainees and college students studying criminal justice. (Barbara Morgan, Franklyn Morgan, Victoria Foster, Jered Kolbert. "Promoting the moral and conceptual development of law enforce trainees: A deliberate psychological educational approach".) A police administrator determined to engage in an extensive reform and invest resources in corruption control without information about the nature, extent, and organization of corruption in the agency is likely wasting at least part of the resources, lowering the morale, strengthening the code of silence, and raising doubts about his ability to manage the organization. Moreover, without accurate measurement of corruption, the degree of success of a reform is often determined on the basis of its political appeal and the absence of subsequent scandals, rather than on the true impact the reform has had on the actual corruption in the agency. According to Doug Bower "A reader asked me, referring to Mexico, How could you live in a country that is so corrupt This was based partly on a cited incident in a story by Tim Donnelly entitled, Sanctuary Lost, in which Mr. Donnelly says, "Almost 80% of the illegal aliens in Los Angeles County come from Mexico, where corruption is a way of life, where you are just as likely to be robbed and beaten by a policeman as helped." (Sanctuary Lost By Tim Donnelly Jun 4, 2005, 22:44) Using the same reasoning, let's take a look at American police behavior and see if we can come up with the same conclusion that in America you are just as liable to be beaten as helped. Rodney Glen King (born April 2, 1965, in Sacramento, California) was an African-American motorist who, while videotaped by a bystander (George Holliday), was struck repeatedly by Los Angeles police officers (LAPD) during a police stop on March 3, 1991. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_King) According to Amnesty International: "There is a widespread and persistent problem of police brutality across the USA. Police officers have beaten and shot unresisting suspects; they have misused batons, chemical sprays, and electro-shock weapons; they have injured or killed people by placing them in dangerous restraint holds." (Police Brutality in American) Excessive force has been used against mentally ill or disturbed people, who are engaged in non-threatening behavior. In Fairfield, California in June 1996, James Parkinson, an unarmed, mentally ill man running naked around a swimming pool, died following being sprayed by police with pepper spray, hit with a teaser gun and shackled face-down. (Ibid) Police brutality changes journalist's life By Art Marroquin, Cal State Fullerton June 14, 1996. "Racially motivated police beatings are stories most reporters want to cover. But for minority reporters, these beatings are more than stories. They represent horrors minorities potentially could suffer everyday. Such was the case for syndicated columnist Roberto Rodriguez. Five Whittier, California, policemen cracked his skull when he was 24 years old." (http://www.saxakali.com/CommunityLinkups/NYCBdEd4.htm) According to the international monitoring group Transparency International, "Mexico's police and armed services are known to be contaminated by multimillion dollar bribes from the transnational narco-trafficking business. Though the problem is not as pervasive in the military as it is in the police, it is widely considered to have attained the status of a national security threat." (Hodess, Robin (ed.), Transparency International, Global Corruption Report 2001) The prediction, control, and prevention of police corruption represent pervasive and enduring problems. Researchers have suggested that intervention at the preemployment screening stage may be the best solution. However, investigators have acknowledged that existing assessment practices are flawed. This article proposes a strategy for the preemployment screening of law enforcement personnel. In particular, it examines the utility of the Inwald Personality Inventory and the Revised-NEO Personality Inventory in relation to assessing antisocial behavioral tendencies and conscientious personality traits, respectively, and argues that their combined use, appropriately administered in a testing situation, represents a reliable and valid predictor of good job performance. The article speculatively comments on this strategy for purposes of psychological testing, future research in the field, and law enforcement administration practices. (Alliant International University Institute of Psychology, Law, and Public Policy) If we want to measure the extent of corruption within the police department, it is crucial to delineate what corruption is and what sort of what corrupt behavior is prohibited by internal agency rules, it varies from agency to agency and across time within the same agency. Thus, as challenging as measuring corruption in a given agency at a given time undoubtedly is, making any comparisons across space and time even more difficult and riddled with problems that render any resulting conclusions questionable and tentative at best. By 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, such as who is included in the definition of the 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 (e.g., city, county), and in subject jurisdiction from general-jurisdiction police to park, university, or transit police, all the way to the most recent addition: 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 (revised to 17,784 full-time state and local law enforcement agencies). Similarly, which employees sworn, non-sworn, reserve, recruits, Police Corps, full-time, part-time are to be counted also needs to be decided upon, although that decision is somewhat less challenging: a typical calculation of the governmental police force (once a decision is made as to which forces are to be counted) includes sworn police officers. The number of sworn personnel in the U.S. in 1965 was reportedly 371,000, and it rose to 663,535 in 1998. Needless to say, the problems related to this aspect of measurement become even more complex in the international, comparative arena and needs to be solved at an international level. The logical sources 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 he or she 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, supervisors whose agendas, although dissimilar in many aspects and motivated by different incentives, may converge in pursuit of the same specific common goal: disseminating as little 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, findings of corruption are perceived almost exclusively as detrimental signs of the agency's lack of integrity. Thus, police chiefs and police administrators 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 for as long as possible, and, once corruption is discovered, downplay its extent and importance as much as possible and swiftly punish a few officers publicly accused of engaging in corrupt acts. "The basis for ethical behavior in law enforcement is formed by the law enforcement code of ethics and the police code of conduct. These documents offer the guidelines for law enforcement personnel to carry out ethical investigations, employ only the force required to apprehend an individual, and avoid conflicts of interest and corruption. These ethical statements, together with suitable training and strong leadership, induce law enforcement officers to become members of an ethical profession." (Grant, J. Kevin. "Ethics and Law Enforcement".) Police officers, 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 and its presence has a serious impact on the 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, questions asked of police officers about their own criminality and criminality of others, if answered truthfully and later revealed, can entail serious ramifications, ranging from internal discipline (including dismissal) to convictions on felony charges. The United Nations Drug Control Program noted the inevitable risk of drug-related police corruption in 1998, when it reported that "wherever there is a well-organized, illicit drug industry, there is also the danger of police corruption." (United Nations International Drug Control Program, Technical Series Report #6) 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 attendees 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 States to provide specific examples of corruption in their department, without revealing names or places, and what they think could have been done to prevent it. None of the 49 respondents provided an answer. Three organizational failures can foster a resentful, cynical and demoralized work force leading to individual and collective acts of corruption. These failures are little or ineffective discipline and deselection of trainees; ignorance of the nature and effects of the goal-gradient phenomenon; and the allowance of a double standard within the organization. Perry offers suggestions on the prevention of police corruption. (Frank L Perry. "Repairing broken windows: Preventing corruption within our ranks") Works Cited A Corrupt Personality, Michael Gips, Security Management. Volume: 42. Issue: 9, September 1998. P 14. Alliant International University Institute of Psychology, Law, and Public Policy 5130 East Clinton Way Fresno, California 93723 USA Corruption of Law Enforcement Officers & Public Officials, Drug War Facts, http:///www.drugwarfacts.org General Accounting Office, Report to the Honorable Charles B. Rangel, House of Representatives, Law Enforcement: Information on Drug-Related Police Corruption (Washington, DC: USGPO, May 1998), p. 36. Information & Library Services, http:///www.pretoria.usembassy.org International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, Sage Publications, Vol. 47, No. 3, 272-290 (2003) Mexicans Police Brutality, American Chronicle Mexicans Police Brutality Really.htm "Police interrogation A practical necessity". Fred E Inbau, Journal Of criminal law & Criminology. Chicago: Summer 1999. Vol.89, Iss. 4, p. 1403-1412 (10 pp.) To Serve and Collect: Measuring Police Corruption, Sanja Kutnjak Ivkovic, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. Volume: 93. Issue: 2-3, 2003. p 593. Transparency International, Global Corruption Report 2001, Hodess, Robin (ed.), (Berlin, Germany: Transparency International, 2001), p. 158. Read More