Analysis Of Police Corruption Essay Research Paper — страница 2

3) “Clean Graft” where money is paid to police for services, or where courtesy discounts are given as a matter of course to the police. “Police officers have been involved in activities such as extortion of money and/or narcotics from narcotics viloators in order to aviod arrest; they have accepted bribes; they have sold narcotics. They have known of narcotics vilolations and have failed to take proper enforcement action. They have entered into personal associations with narcotics criminals and in some cases have used narcotics. They have given false testimony in court in order to obtain dismissal of the charges against a defendant.” (Sherman 1978: p 129) A scandal is perceived both as a socially constructed phenomenon and as an agent of change that can lead to

realignments in the structure of power within oraganizations. New york, for instance, has had more than a half dozen major scandals concerning its police department within a century. It was the Knapp Commission in 1972 that first brought attention to the NYPD when they released the results of over 2 years of investigations of alleged corruption. The findings were that bribery, especially amoung narcotics officers, was extremely high. As a result many officers were prosecuted and many more lost their jobs. A massive re-structuring took place aftewards with strict rules and regulations to make sure that the problem would never happen again. Be that as it may, the problem did arrise once gain… Some of the most recent events to shake New York City and bring attention to the

national problem of police corruption was brought up begining in 1992 when five officers were arrested on drug-trafficing charges. Michael Dowd, the suspected ‘ring leader’, was the kind of cop who gave new meaning to the word moonlighting. It wasn’t just any job that the 10-year veteran of the New York City force was working on the side. Dowd was a drug dealer. From scoring free pizza as a rookie he graduated to pocketing cash seized in drug raids and from there simply to robbing dealers outright, sometimes also relieving them of drugs that he would resell. Soon he had formed “a crew” of 15 to 20 officers in his Brooklyn precinct who hit up dealers regularly. Eventually one of them was paying Dowd and another officer $8,000 a week in protection money. Dowd bought four

suburban homes and a $35,000 red Corvette. Nobody asked how he managed all that on take-home pay of $400 a week. In May 1992 Dowd, four other officers and one former officer were arrested for drug trafficking by police in Long Island’s Suffolk County. When the arrests hit the papers, it was forehead-slapping time among police brass. Not only had some of their cops become robbers, but the crimes had to be uncovered by a suburban police force. Politicians and the media started asking what had happened to the system for rooting out police corruption established 21 years ago at the urging of the Knapp Commission, the investigatory body that heard Officer Frank Serpico and other police describe a citywide network of rogue cops. (New York Times, March 29, 1993: p 8) To find out, at

the time, New York City mayor David Dinkins established the Mollen Commission, named for its chairman, Milton Mollen, a former New York judge. Last week, in the same Manhattan hearing room where the Knapp Commission once sat, the new body heard Dowd and other officers add another lurid chapter to the old story of police corruption. And with many American cities wary that drug money will turn their departments bad, police brass around the country were lending an uneasy ear to the tales of officers sharing lines of coke from the dashboard of their squad cars and scuttling down fire escapes with sacks full of cash stolen from dealers’ apartments. (New York Times, April 3, 1993: p. 5) The Mollen Commission has not uncovered a citywide system of payoffs among the 30,000-member

force. In fact, last week’s testimony focused on three precincts, all in heavy crime areas. But the tales, nevertheless, were troubling. Dowd described how virtually the entire precinct patrol force would rendezvous at times at an inlet on Jamaica Bay, where they would drink, shoot off guns in the air and plan their illegal drug raids. (New York Times, Nov. 17, 1993: p. 3) It was “victimless crimes” problem which many view was a prime cause in the growth of police abuse. Reports have shown that the large majority of corrupt acts by police involve payoffs from both the perpetrators and the “victims” of victimless crimes. The knapp commission in the New York found that although corruption among police officers was not restricted to this area, the bulk of it involved