Police corruption

SIGNIFICANCE: Police corruption, which may take the form of soliciting, taking, or offering bribes; selling favors; accepting gifts; abusing authority; and aiding and abetting criminal behavior, is anathema to the repository of public trust in institutions that are entrusted with protecting citizens from crime and bringing criminals to justice. In a nation that regards democracy and justice as cardinal values, the investigation, prosecution, and punishment of corrupt police officers are crucial for preservation and advancement of social order, as well as efficacy of the criminal justice system itself.

Police corruption poses a dilemma for the criminal justice system because of the unique trust that the public has in police to stamp out crime and bring criminals to justice. Police corruption puts courts at odds with their supposed primary ally in the pursuit of justice. Although corrupt officers constitute a small percentage of sworn officers, corruption is a serious matter that needs to be addressed to maintain police morale and retain public confidence in the police.

History

Corruption among police is as old as the profession of policing. In fact, prevention of crime and elimination of bribery were two of the major reasons why the first police force was established in London in 1829. In colonial America, corrupt practices and official recklessness punctuated the history and development of law enforcement. Citizen groups exercised responsibility for law and order in their small and homogeneous communities through the watch, or vigilante, system. Over time, new immigration and industrialization transformed small settlements into large communities until many of them became true towns and cities.

Although the watch system persisted into the twentieth century in many communities, it became obvious that it could no longer effectively police crime in heterogeneous societies. In frontier communities, especially in the Far West, corrupt and dishonest bounty hunters, similar to private police agents called thief takers in eighteenth-century England, were often hired by private citizens for debt collection and the apprehension of felons. Vigilantism and bounty hunting were riddled with corruption, particularly as they were sometimes used to extract money from both honest citizens and criminals at the same time.

County sheriffs were officially the most important law officers. They were charged with keeping the peace, crime fighting, tax collection, and election supervision. For their services, they were paid by the fee system, an outdated practice in which peace officers kept percentages of the taxes they collected and received fixed amounts for every arrest they made. With time, it became obvious to many that tax collection and graft were more lucrative than crime fighting, so those pursuits consumed much of the time of early law officers. Meanwhile, burgeoning cities looked toward the successful London type of policing to deal with their own spiraling crime problems.

In 1838, the first formal police department in the United States was created in Boston. New York followed in 1844 and Philadelphia in 1854. Between the 1840s and the 1890s, corruption spurred by political patronage permeated the newly established police departments. Some officers had to pay bribes for promotions or assignments in areas offering opportunities for graft. The roles and functions of early police departments were ill defined; they were utilized primarily as enforcement arms of the reigning political powers and concentrated on controlling European immigrants and protecting private property. Later, many of the corrupt practices of this early system carried over into the more professional police departments of the twentieth century, and some have remained fixtures of city police departments into the twenty-first century.

Types of Corruption

The most prevalent forms of police corruption are accepting gratuities, selective enforcement of laws, outright theft and burglary, bribery and extortion, and internal corruption. Other forms include aiding and abetting criminal behavior, abuse of authority, perjury, favoritism, and brutality.

A gratuity is any type of payment received by the police in the form of gifts made with the expectation of later receiving favors in return. Some police departments have strict guidelines prohibiting acceptance of any form of gift from citizens.

Selective enforcement occurs when officers exercise legitimate discretion in deciding what action to take but for improper reasons. An example would be letting a criminal act go unpunished in exchange for something of value.

Theft and burglary involve active criminality by sworn officers. Examples include an officer keeping part of the money seized during a drug bust or taking money from suspects arrested for public drunkenness who are unlikely to remember how much cash they should have. A petty form of police theft, called “shopping,” is the police taking small items, such as gum, candy, and cigarettes, from stores that are left unlocked after business hours. Some police also actively engage in premeditated and outright burglary that involves forced entry into business places for the sole purpose of robbery. Police burglary rings have been uncovered in such major American cities as Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, Nashville, and Reno.

Other categories of police theft include shakedowns and stealing money, drugs, and other property from department evidence rooms and unguarded business premises. Shakedown is a corrupt police practice of extorting expensive items for personal use while responding to emergency calls for break-ins or burglaries and attributing the resulting losses to the burglars.

Bribery is the voluntary offer of something of value to a police officer aimed at influencing the officer’s duty performance. For an offense to qualify as bribery, citizens must initiate the offer, such as by offering officers money in return for not being arrested. Extortion differs from bribery in being initiated by officers who use their power to demand money, services, or goods from criminal suspects in return for favors. A typical example is an officer who refrains from arresting a drug dealer in return for cash payments.

Bribery and extortion take a variety of forms. For example, the pad is a regular weekly, biweekly, or monthly payoff by a criminal enterprise to police, usually in exchange for protection against arrest and interference. A score is a one-time payment solicited by an officer from a violator to avoid ticketing or arrest. Mooching involves the acceptance of gifts such as liquor or even donuts from retail establishments in exchange for such favors as ignoring city code violations by the establishments. Chiseling is a demand made by an officer for price discounts or free admission to events not connected to police duty.

Police who commit perjury intentionally lie while under oath in court, usually for the purpose of ensuring the conviction of a defendant or to cover up for a fellow officer caught in unlawful activity. Favoritism is the selective favoring of one citizen or group at the expense of another. An example is giving immunity to friends or relatives from citations for traffic violations.

Police officers who aid criminal behavior are present at the scenes of crimes and render assistance to the perpetrators without personally taking part in the crimes. By contrast, abetting involves constructive presence during the commission of crimes or assisting or encouraging others to commit crimes without directly participating in their commission.

Police brutality encompasses the use of abusive language, unnecessary use of force or coercion, threats, and harassing searches while dealing with suspects. Police brutality is considered a form of corruption because it entails abuse of authority. An incident in May 2020 elicited demonstrations across the country when a Black man in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was killed by a White police officer. The officer kneeled on George Floyd's neck and continued to do so even after Floyd lost consciousness. Floyd died and the officer was convicted of murder. Another officer who held back the crowd was found guilty of aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter.

Internal corruption involves corruption at the departmental level. For example, in some police departments, promotions and favorable assignments are sold to the highest bidders. The Knapp Commission that investigated the New York City Police Department during the early 1970s noted that systematic payoffs permeated the entire departmental apparatus. Investigators even found a chart listing the selling prices of every police rank.

Departmental corruption can be classified in three categories: rotten apples and rotten pockets, pervasive unorganized corruption, and pervasive organized corruption. A rotten apples and rotten pockets department is one in which a minority of officers use their positions for personal gain. When there is no organized effort by other members of the force to institutionalize such behavior, the culpable officers can usually be identified and flushed out. Pervasive unorganized corruption develops in departments in which the corruption of a few officers goes unchecked, and other officers join them. The main difference between this and the previous form of department corruption is the numbers of officers involved. Pervasive organized corruption is found in departments in which large numbers of officers practice organized corruption with the cooperation of their administrators, as was found in New York City by the Knapp Commission.

Prevalence

Police corruption is still a serious problem in the twenty-first century, and the police departments of the largest cities tend to be most prone to the problem. As the largest and one of the oldest American police departments, the New York City Police Department has a long history of pervasive corruption, but New York is not the only American city that has faced the problem. Most big cities have had similar cases of official corruption.

During the early years of the twenty-first century, an investigation into the Los Angeles Police Department found that officers in its Rampart Division had persistently engaged in such active criminal pursuits as bank robbery, false imprisonment, theft of drugs, planting evidence on victims, and outright brutalizing of arrestees. The investigation led to the indictment of several officers on charges ranging from drug dealing and framing of innocent people to using torture to force confessions and murder.

In Cleveland, Ohio, forty-nine police officers and jail guards were convicted of accepting bribes to protect drug shipments. In Detroit, Michigan, the city’s first Black police chief was convicted of diverting nearly $1.3 million of departmental money to his own personal use. In Miami, Florida, police officers were convicted of active burglary of private homes and the theft of $2 million worth of cocaine. In an unrelated case, four Miami officers were convicted of stealing $13 million worth of cocaine from a drug-smuggling boat. Two separate suspicious deaths have also been linked to two Miami police officers. Other cases include the disappearance of $150,000 from a police department safe.

A much different kind of police corruption occurred in Tulia, Texas. There it was found that the convictions of forty-three persons on drug charges in 1999 had been based on the uncorroborated evidence of one corrupt undercover officer who framed all of them. That same officer had earlier fled from his previous law-enforcement job to avoid theft charges. These and other examples of corrupt practices in different states suggest that police corruption is a pervasive problem.

Investigation

Three major ways of controlling police corruption and brutality include establishing rules and regulations, initiating civil liability lawsuits, and prompting investigative processes. Rules and regulations are written departmental policies that inform all officers of expected standards of behavior, thereby establishing clear grounds for easy supervision and discipline of erring officers. Such rules also communicate to the community what standards to expect from their officers. Civil liability lawsuits are tort actions designed to make erring officers and their departments pay compensatory damages to litigants for personal harm resulting from the officers’ unreasonable actions.

The third method of controlling corruption is through investigative processes. In directed efforts to restore public trust and confidence in the police, most big cities have instituted police administrative and civilian review boards to reduce police control by special interests and stem corruption. These boards are assigned the responsibility of appointing police administrators and overseeing police affairs, including investigations of all allegations of corruption. Additionally, most large city departments have established internal affairs units.

Internal affairs units are committees made up of officers within departments that investigate allegations of corruption and brutality by members of their departments. These bodies generally involve high-ranking officers in their investigations. After they complete fair and impartial evaluations of complaints, they can take any of four actions: unfound the allegations, exonerate the accused, declare the allegations not sustained, or declare the allegation as sustained. “Unfounded” rulings are issued when the evidence is insufficient to be sure the alleged incidents have actually taken place. Exonerations are issued when investigations find the accused officers’ conduct to have been both lawful and justified. “Not sustained” rulings are issued when investigations lack sufficient evidence to proceed with the cases. Allegations are “sustained” when there is sufficient evidence to prove them and thereby justify disciplinary actions against the accused officers.

Civilian review boards are independent tribunals made up of leading members of the civilian community. These boards review internal affairs recommendations on grievances leveled against the police, especially in brutality and corruption cases. Civilian review boards serve as independent oversight agencies and tend to be most popular in jurisdictions that practice community policing. In such communities, police departments generally go out of their way to accommodate diverse interests and maintain cordial relations with members of the community to clear all doubts about their officers’ conduct.

Special commissions have frequently been created to investigate charges of police corruption. One of the most famous was created in May 1970, by New York City’s Mayor John V. Lindsay, in response to an article in The New York Times charging widespread corruption in the city’s police department. To investigate the allegations, Lindsay appointed the Knapp Commission, which issued its report in August 1972. The document was a massive indictment of the New York City Police department. New York is generally regarded as having the highest levels of police corruption of any American city. Since the 1880s, its police have been investigated by special commissions an average of once every twenty years. The Knapp Commission itself was preceded by the Gross Commission of 1954 and followed by the Mollen Commission of 1994.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, the focus of police corruption investigations was shifting to drug-related offenses and publicized cases of police involvement in illegal drug trafficking, especially in New York, Miami, Chicago, and Philadelphia. During the 1990s, for example, the Mollen Commission found serious incidents of drug trafficking and related corruption in the New York City Police Department. Officers in some precincts were caught selling drugs and beating suspects. The Mollen Commission found the worst examples of police corruption and brutality in neighborhoods with large minority populations. The commission also found that vigilante justice and power were additional factors influencing drug-related police corruption.

In 2023, Connecticut was facing a backlog of nvestigations into police misconduct. In the three years since state lawmakers passed the 2020 Police Accountability Act, nearly fifty cases of misconduct were investigated for potential decertification of the officers. The law included new restrictions on use of force and searches and broadened reasons for decertification including conduct that undermined confidence in law enforcement such as tampering with evidence and racial profiling. In one case, an officer allegedly stole $500 during a drug task force operation. Other cases involved officers falsifying documents and misusing a police database.

Prosecution

During the 1990s, police corruption remained sufficiently pervasive to cause serious concern in political circles and government. Corruption in this sense also encompasses police brutality because it involves police abuse of its legitimate authority. Persistent incidents, especially drug-related corruption, attracted so much media attention that the US House of Representatives, through the US General Accounting Office (GAO), commissioned an investigation into drug-related police corruption. The commission’s 1998 report found wide-scale police involvement in drug-related corruption, particularly in eleven major cities.

In 1995, six Atlanta police officers were convicted on drug-related crimes, and another five were suspended though not charged. During the following year, seven Chicago police officers were indicted for robbery and extortion of money and narcotics from known drug dealers, and another three officers were arrested in 1997 for conspiracy to commit robbery and sale of illegally confiscated narcotics. In 1998, forty-four officers from local police, sheriff, and corrections departments were charged with taking money to protect cocaine traffickers. In another incident in 1991, nine Detroit police officers were prosecuted on charges of conspiracy to aid and abet the distribution of cocaine, attempted money laundering, and other crimes.

Other prosecutions have included twenty-seven Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies and one officer of the city of Los Angeles’s elite narcotics unit being convicted in 1994 for hiding drug money. During that same year, eleven New Orleans police officers were convicted for receiving more than $100,000 from Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) undercover agents posing as cocaine suppliers. Similarly, more than one hundred Miami police officers were convicted and punished for drug-related offenses during the 1980s.

The results of FBI-led investigations into police corruption and convictions between 1993 and 1997 indicate that indictments and convictions for police corruption were on an upward trend. In 1993, there were 129 convictions of law-enforcement officers for corruption throughout the United States; 59 of the convictions were for drug-related offenses. In 1994, 1995, and 1997 the numbers of convictions exceeded 135 each year, and the proportions of drug-related convictions were similar to the 1993 figures.

The National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project released its Police Misconduct Statistical Report in 2010, finding that 6,613 sworn law enforcement officers were involved in reported acts of misconduct that year, with 7.2 percent of the officers reported engaging in acts of theft, fraud, and robbery. In 2013, fifty-three drug convictions were dropped by a federal court after it was learned that the cases had been corrupted by a veteran police officer of Philadelphia's narcotics unit. The following year, the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was still settling lawsuits filed by individuals wrongfully convicted of drug crimes after an investigation had led to the conviction of four officers in the Tulsa Police Department accused of corruption crimes such as perjury. Also in 2014, two San Francisco police officers were convicted of conspiracy, theft, and wire fraud by a federal court; a surveillance video had been released by a public defender in 2011 that had shown the officers stealing property during raids of single room occupancy apartments.

The Baltimore police department was particularly marred by cases of corruption in the second decade of the twenty-first century. One of the worst in its history was discovered beginning in 2017. By the end of the year, eight of the officers making up an elite special unit known as the Gun Trace Task Force had been indicted on charges including extortion, robbery, fraud, and both planting as well as selling drugs. While six of the officers pled guilty, two were facing trial in early 2018. At the same time, other court cases were reopened to establish whether defendants had been wrongfully convicted in instances involving members of the task force, further proving that the effects of the officers' crimes were expansive.

Punishment has often been difficult due to qualified immunity. This is a type of legal immunity that shields government officials, including police officers, from lawsuits that allege they violated a plaintiff's rights. Some civil rights organizations have campaigned to remove qualified immunity to hold officials accountable.

Punishment

Two major methods of punishment have been used to discipline officers convicted of corruption: administrative and judicial processing. Possible forms of administrative punishments for convicted officers include departmental warnings, suspensions of pay and from duty, relief of command especially for commanders, demotions in rank, referrals for criminal prosecution, and outright dismissals from departments. Typical judicial outcomes are warnings, fines, and incarceration.

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