w-enforcement officials who have sworn to protect the public trust. The whole effect is to cast doubt on the integrity of the relationship between the public and their supposed protectors. It is as if those who hold power or can purchase it are interested not in their professional mission but instead in preserving their social status and power.
Although Ivkovic believes that it is important to understand what could have caused police agencies all over the world to suffer from such well-documented cases of police corruption in order to engage in reform, the fact is that whatever the cause of police corruption is, it is essential to intervene in, suppress, and punish the pathological behavior of police agencies because of the effect that they have on the perception, on one hand, and the experience, on the other, of the public in relationship to such agencies.
A mere recital of certain facts points up, so to speak, the depth of long-term police pathology in the relatively small town of West New York, and the heights to which pathology that is protected by police power may rise. Troncone (2004) cites the behavior of one Albio Sires, who serves as the town's mayor and as Speaker of New Jersey's General Assembly and who claims to have revealed the police corruption. How
...