Corruption/Integrity

By virtue of the fact that policing is a highly discretionary, coercive activity that routinely takes place in private settings, out of the sight of supervisors, and before witnesses who are often regarded as unreliable, it is, as the history of virtually every police agency in the world bears testimony, an occupation that is rife with opportunities for misconduct of many types. One type of misconduct, corruption—the abuse of police authority for gain—has been particularly problematic.

The difficulties of corruption begin with controversy over its very definition. There is a considerable literature which describes complications in the conception of corruption as the abuse of authority for gain. For example, Maurice Punch emphasizes that the gain does not need to be a personal reward but may be for the benefit of a group or the police organization as a whole. In the same vein, John Kleinig makes the point that one may perform a service for which one receives an unauthorized reward but does so without distorting that service or the manner of its delivery. Although such actions, in Kleinig's view, may not be corrupt, the acceptance of them may detract from “the democratic ethos of policing” and should be discouraged.

Despite the complexities and complications of definition, it is probably wise to preserve both the for-gain and the abuse dimensions of the concept. The benefits of doing so are purely administrative. As Herman Goldstein argued persuasively, other forms of police misconduct that do not normally have a for-gain motive for them (e.g., discourtesy, brutality, incompetence) suggest a distinctly different approach to their control. Likewise, the concept of abuse is sufficiently broad to include distortions of the police role or the form in which it is delivered, as well as any undemocratic message it may imply.

The more problematic aspects of police corruption are not its definition but its resistance to measurement and control. Contributing to the difficulties of both measuring and controlling corruption is not only the reluctance of police officers to report corrupt activities of their fellow officers—a phenomenon sometimes identified as the Code or the Code of Silence—and the reluctance of police administrators to admit the existence of corruption, but also the fact that the typical corrupt transaction benefits the parties to it and thus leaves no immediate victim/ complainant to report or call attention to it.

Further complicating our understanding of corruption has been a self-serving administrative view of corruption as reflecting the moral defects of individually defective police officers and ignoring those organizational practices that shield and sustain it.[Page 102] The so-called bad apple theory of police corruption has been discredited in recent years by some experts.

What has come to replace the bad apple, individualistic view of corruption is a view emphasizing the role of the organization. This view of corruption stresses the organization's role in creating, communicating, and enforcing organizational rules; detecting, investigating, and punishing rule violations; circumscribing the code of silence; and managing the pressures that the social and political environment places on police. In this view, it is the police administrators' responsibility to create an organizational environment and culture that is intolerant of corruption.

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