To serve and collect: measuring police corruption.

AuthorIvkovic, Sanja Kutnjak

Stories of police corruption are cover-page news: they draw public attention and sell the newspapers. As the recent examples from Los Angeles (1) to Tokyo (2) and from New York (3) to Rio de Janeiro (4) demonstrate, no police agency is completely free of corruption and police officers--the "blue knights" entrusted and empowered to enforce the law--can become some of the most aggressive criminals themselves.

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.

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. (5)

Despite its apparent significance and the vast resources invested in the police, the measurement of police corruption--or, for that matter, any other type of corruption--is surprisingly underdeveloped, as illustrated by Jacobs:

Unlike for most other crimes, there are no official data on the corruption rate. How much corruption is there? Is the rate rising or falling? Is there more corruption now than in previous decades? Is there more corruption in one city than another, in one government department than another? Has corruption decreased after passage of a law, announcement of an investigation or arrests, or implementation of managerial reforms? Corruption cannot be estimated by examining the Uniform Crime Reports or the National Crime Victimization Survey. Thus, it cannot be determined whether any particular anticorruption strategy or spate of strategies is working. We are data deprived. (6) Although no official nationwide data on police corruption are available, the situation regarding measurement of corruption is somewhat brighter than Jacobs claims it to be. In this paper, I draw upon the available data to examine the extent and nature of police corruption and provide a comprehensive analysis of the existing methods for corruption measurement. Specifically, I discuss the existing assessments of police corruption (conducted for a variety of reasons, from performing cross-national comparisons, estimating the investment risk, to smoothing the effects of a scandal), analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each methodological approach, and elaborate on the extent to which these efforts show promise in the measurement of key corruption-relevant issues. I argue that, while each individual method (e.g., interviews, surveys, observations) suffers from numerous drawbacks and is therefore highly problematic when used as the sole source of corruption-related information, methodological approaches that relied on combinations of various methods have had more success in estimating the actual corruption and should thus be regarded as superior.

  1. PROBLEMS AT THE OUTSET

    First, in the course of measuring police corruption it is crucial to delineate what corruption is. Unfortunately, in most countries legal statutes do not feature a crime specifically titled "corruption." Even if it were not so, the definitions would probably vary at least as much as the definitions of most crimes across the world do. (7) Behavior typically understood as "corruption" is classified as bribery and extortion, but, depending on the legal system, it may also be classified as theft, fraud, tax evasion, or racketeering. (8) Some countries "may not even define some of the acts (e.g., bribery) as criminal at all." (9) Similarly, what corrupt behavior is prohibited by internal agency rules varies from agency to agency (10) 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 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, 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. (11) 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, (12) 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). (13) 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, (14) and it rose to 663,535 in 1998. (15) Needless to say, the problems related to this aspect of measurement become even more complex in the international, comparative arena. (16)

    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 they 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, (17) chief, (18) 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, (19) 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 ("bad apples"). (20)

    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. (21) Regardless of how severe and extensive the actual consequences of the violation of the code of silence are (22) and what is actually covered by the code in an agency, (23) the code seems to be shared by police officers (24) 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, (25) 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.

    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. (26) Under a guarantee of confidentiality, a question in the survey asked of the respondents--very experienced police officers, mostly supervisors from...

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