Police Corruption Research Paper

Understanding police corruption: socially acceptable or a taboo? Looking back at the history of policing in the United States of America, the first era of policing was known as the political era. During the political era, political influence was enormously involved in policing. As corruption became a challenge for policing, the policing models were reformed. The professional or reform era ascended due to the impact of the steps taken to separate police works from the influence of local politicians (Kelling & Moore, 1989). Even though time has carried us to the community era of policing, still corruption is a serious challenge for effective policing. Some police officers do not even understand what an act of corruption is, while others rationalize

Corruption can be defined as an act which involves the misuse of authority in any way. The act could be motivated for a personal gain, a gain of another person, or factors which do not include any sort of gain (Goldstein, 1975). Police corruption can be said as any of these acts conducted by a police officer. These acts can be as simple as taking a water bottle from a crime scene and drinking it. All the types of corruption can be categorized into two levels. Petty individual level of corruption and grand level of corruption are the two levels (Morris, 2011). The petty level of corruption involves a small amount of gain such as small sums of money. This level of corruption harms the poorest members of a society. Grand level of corruption involves high levels of officials or politicians. This level involves large sums of money and other gains which result in a large scale of loss to the community (Fjeldstad, Andvig, Amundsen, Sissener, & Søreide, 2001). All the types of corruption fall into either one of the mentioned levels of corruption. As stated in (Roebuck & Barker, 1974), corruption of authority, opportunistic theft, and protection of illegal activities are types of police corruption. These are the three serious and common forms of corruption that will be explained in this