Police Corruption: Causes and Effects Introduc

Police Corruption: Causes and Effects

Introduction and Statement of Purpose

Edwin J. Delattre (1996, p. 68), a scholar in the field of criminal justice who has extensively studied issues related to the causes and effects of police corruption, has argued that argued that "those who serve the public must be held to a higher standard of honesty and care for the public good than the general citizenry." This view speaks to the necessity, in any society and particularly within a democratic society, of ensuring that the guardians of law and order are themselves fully compliant with the laws they are responsible for upholding. While few would disagree with this perception of the trust vested in the police departments of the United States and the corresponding expectations of ethical and moral conduct held by citizens with respect to police officers, the sad reality is that American police forces are not free of corruption (Perry, 2001).

When cases of law enforcement corruption in the current era are revealed, they come increasingly in the context of drug law enforcement (Police corruption and�, 2000). The beat cop who once may have looked the other way in Prohibition when a speakeasy let in its guests, or more recently have turned a blind eye to a floating poker or craps game, has been increasingly replaced by officers who actively engage in either protecting or facilitating the sale and transport of illicit drugs in cities such as New York and Los Angeles. More often tha

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at the NYPD, from the top down, had failed to monitor or adequately investigate officers guilty of abuses and that senior officers were practicing a deliberate "blindness" to corruption (Behind the Blue Wall, 2001). Richard Lacayo (1993) wrote at the time of the Mollen Commission that the growth of community policing had dovetailed with the increase in police corruption, particularly at the local or beat level. This reporter also claimed that efforts by IAD investigators to root out the officers ultimately found guilty of narcotics trafficking, were blocked by the "code of silence" to which many NYPD and other city police officers adhere. Among the results of the Mollen Commission were the arrests of 14 police officers in the 30th police precinct in West Harlem, a poverty-ridden African-American neighborhood where drug trafficking was endemic (NYPD blues�, 1994). Judge Milton Mollen, a former deputy mayor of New York City and the head of the commission, publicly stated that more than 40 cases of corruption involving senior NYPD officers had never been prosecuted while another approximately 100 cases had been effectively buried or lost in the system. A major recommendation of the Mollen Commission was the establishment of an

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