History of Police corruption
History of Police corruptionHistory of Police Corruption in the United States
The challenges facing the Chicago Police Department today are not new, nor are they unique to this city. The problem reaches back as far as the establishment of the first organized police forces in the United States. Corruption has taken many forms and has continued to plague the police departments of nearly every major city.
Police corruption may change form over time, but its roots are firmly planted in American history. In The Development of the American Police: An Historical Overview, Uchida notes that "if there is a common theme that can be used to characterize the police in the 19th Century, it is the large-scale corruption that occurred in most police departments across the United States" (Uchida, 1993). In Forces of Deviance: Understanding the Dark Side of Policing, Kappeler, Sluder, and Alpert point out that corruption among police is not new or peculiar to the late 20th century. "To study the history of police is to study police deviance, corruption and misconduct." (Kappeler et al., 1994.)
While corruption has been a consistent and pervasive problem in law enforcement, the nature of corrupt activity has changed dramatically over the years. The trend to "professionalize" police forces through improved recruitment, training, salaries, and working conditions has resulted in fewer corrupt officers who, unfortunately, are now involved in more serious criminal activities. Low-level passive forms of corruption (i.e., systemic bribery schemes, non-enforcement of the law, collusion) have been replaced by more aggressive forms of corruption. Today's police corruption is most likely to involve drugs, organized crime, and relatively sophisticated but small groups of officers engaged in felonious criminal activities.
The cycle of police scandals in New York City provide a clear example of this trend. In the 1970s, New York's Knapp Commission on Police Corruption identified two general forms of corruption -- police officers involved in relatively low level forms of corruption and misconduct, and those officers involved in large scale corruption. Twenty years later, New York's Mollen Commission revisited the issue and found the face of corruption had changed. Their primary problem was "crew corruption," wherein groups of officers protect and assist each...
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