Police Corruption Essays

Methodology: Corruption within police departments falls into 2 basic categories, which are external corruption and internal corruption.In this report I will concentrate only on external corruption because it has been the larger center of attention recently.My friend would be pulled over and without much a due, a police officer would just take the money and let him go.

Police Corruption What are the first words that come to your mind when you say police?

Thanks to all those police/action/drama TV series like CSI and Law & Order for example, we gained a certain amount of awe towards them from our early age already.

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.

However it is not particularly obvious where brutality, discrimination, and misconduct end and corruption begin.

Essentially, police corruption falls into two major categories-- external corruption which concerns police contacts with the public, and internal corruption, which involves the relationships among policemen within the works of the police department.

Police corruption is unfortunately much spread and very complex, so there is no single way of dealing with it.

It is like a plague because it is very easily spread when police officers do not get revealed or get punished for it.

For a corrupt act to occure, three distinct elements of police corruption must be present simultaneously: 1) missuse of authority, 2) missuse of official capacity, and 3) missuse of personal attainment.

(Dantzker, 1995: p 157) It can be said that power inevitably tends to corrupt, and it is yet to be recongnized 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. There diviance elicits a special feeling of betrayal.