Police Corruption In The United States

When I thought about “police corruption” the first example that came to mind is Mexico and all the dirty cops who work for the cartels. The thought of corruption in the United States is laughable to most. The United States is viewed as a place of freedom, honor, and home of the brave, but the fact remains that corruption is everywhere and can be unrelenting.

According to the Legal Dictionary, police corruption is “the abuse of police authority for personal gain.” To simplify, there are two elements to corruption, abusing the uniform and getting rich off the uniform. Bribery and extortion may be the most commonly portrayed in the media but in reality there are many different forms of corruption. Gratuities are the most common type of corruption

The reason these small thank you’s can be seen as corruption is because they can open the door for more serious forms of corruption but more importantly can lead officers to believe that they are entitled to special treatment because of their job. Bribes fall under the largest umbrella of corruption. Officers can accept bribes for many different things like giving a warning instead of a ticket, taking regular payoffs to turn a blind eye to illegal operations, or to mess with a case by changing testimonies, getting rid of evidence, or sharing important information the defense plans to use. Another type of bribery is getting a cut from a legitimate business like referring criminals to a specific attorney or bondsman. A third type of corruption is theft – stealing from people in custody, the evidence room, or raids. The last two forms of corruptions are rank higher on the corruption scale; they are internal corruption and inhuman violence.

This theory focuses on the moral inadequacies of individuals instead of the department as a whole. When the blame is concentrated on the single person in trouble it provides a “scapegoat” and the simple solution that once that lamb is slaughter there will be no problem. It is a popular explanation for officials because it’s the easiest fix. The blame is put on one officer, there’s no need to dig deeper, and like stated before getting rid of the rotten apple can solve the problem to the public. A couple of problems with this theory is that it doesn’t explain how there are long histories of corruption and how we can’t seem to learn from past mistakes. It doesn’t explain how to prevent more rotten apples from slipping in with the rest and how honest people who swore to uphold the law became rotten in the first