Lecture 9 Police Corruption

hi everyone and welcome to the last lecture we have one more sort of concluding lecture to come uh that one just has a bonus mark attached to it uh so this is our official last lecture you guys have done it you're here the last thing we want to talk about is uh police corruption now before we gonna start talking about police corruption what we have to do is first try to define what police corruption is then take a look at some of the causes of police corruption and end the lecture by talk about some solutions

to police corruption one way to define police uh corruption is to categorize is to define it based on series of categories not as categories can vary they can go from anywhere from you know corruption of authority uh you know doing something i don't know for example maybe kind of demanding a free coffee action portion something like that to getting kickbacks to getting bribes to maybe setting people up to uh maybe kind of falsifying information planting evidence one can imagine that we can go about sort of building these categories you know maybe seven eight nine ten

categories you can even organize them you know from the sort of least impactful in society maybe something like getting a free coffee to the most impactful and free in that society for example you know abusing your discretion or planting evidence or falsifying information things like that protecting uh criminals things like that and what could imagine that sort of this is a learned behavior right that you could move from sort of the least of these types of corruption this is something you'll see sort of in the documentary as well from least forms of corruption to the

most serious one this is what we call sort of crime as a career model in other words we say that as a criminal as someone who's committing a particular criminal activity you're um not likely to kind of start off at the very top of the crime ladder right no one kind of how many people go from not committing any crime to becoming an assassin over right you kind of start off with small crimes and you work your way up just like any other career you learn and you learn and you learn and you work your

way up and what is it you learn well maybe you learn some skills of how to do it how do you steal money how do you plant evidence how do you get abroad maybe part of it is sort of learning the culture learning the subculture kind of realizing that your uh colleagues are not going to disagree with you or your colleagues are not going to rat you out or you know you're all in it together so gaining those sort of cultural capitals we've spoken about before any form of definition of of police corruption is either

too encompassing so it includes things that we can all degrees not really police corruption or at least they're not so seriously put in the same category for example getting a free coffee at tim horton it's qualitatively a different type of police corruption and for example planting evidence so is it really helpful to call all of them police corruption well maybe not you see in an academic sense usually we say something that explains everything explains nothing what do i mean by that i mean a definition that includes everything it's not very useful to us as academics

because it doesn't help us kind of parse out the details parts out there sort of um their unique aspect of the situation we're interested in it and usually as academics we're interested in the details you know the devil's in the details that they say so it can either be too broad and too encompassing or maybe it's not it doesn't include everything in there for example these type of definitions of police corruption oftentimes don't include definition don't include actions that have a noble cause this is what we call noble cause corruption or dirty hairy problems these

are activities that are for the gain of not the individual but the individual believes that this is what they should do in order to do their job properly in other words it crops the means of policing but not the ends of it it says such things as for example you know beating up a suspect to get a confession or planning an evidence on someone that you know is guilty but you're having a hard time catching them so therefore any definition of corruption must pay attention both to the means of policing and the ends yeah there

are certain activities that corrupt the end of policing for example you know uh falsifying evidence to get someone off the hook or protecting drug dealers or tipping them off or getting bribes in order not to arrest them these are the things that sort of jeopardize the very ends of policing the very sort of foundation of why police exist a corruption can also include means of police right things that you do in order to further the cause of policing but they're illegal things to do so maybe instead of defining police as a serie the police corruption

as a series of categories of activities and it's not very useful to us maybe another way to do it would be to sort of make a definition of it that would include these issues one of the best definitions of police corruptions that i've read is by kellogg in uh sort of 1997 work that he argues police officers act corruptly when in the exercise or failing to exercise their authority in order in other words even they do something or fail to do something they act with the primary intention of furthering private or departmental advantages yes i'll

say it again police officers are corruptly wed in exercising or failing to exercise their authority they act with the primary intention of furthering private or departmental gains let's break that down what do we mean there are two important things here one the definition includes boot means and ends up policing so it's either for personal gain or departmental advantage furthering you know increasing arrest reports catching the criminals in this community things like that the other important part of the definition i want you to pay attention to is the word intention see it brings in the notion

of what was the intention of the activity done by the police because police does many menial jobs and police has to get its hands dirty at times in order to do them and we accept that it has been part of our definition of placing all the yeah wrong i don't want to beat the horse you know what i mean sort of go back to sort of let me define what police does in police in uniform kind of talked about how police does many things that this is true when we talked about sort of history of

policing as well that if we're not able to define exactly what they are this is this comes after the very first definition of police right hard to define what police actually does for many it is an intention of the police officer that's important when they commit a particular act and we see this in sort of the legal system that we have in canada the legal system demands that a police officer must be able to justify their action in a reasonable way in other words it might be able to communicate that action in other words but

if a police officer says i pulled that guy over because he looked shady the police officer needs to be able to communicate to people in the courtroom to a group of reasonable people that's what a jury is a group of reasonable people to a group of reasonable people whether or not their intention for stopping the person was a legitimate intention otherwise the police can't just say you know i felt threatened but police can't just say you know i felt like the person looked shady you have to be able to explain why you felt that way

in other words even our court system demands of the police to explain their intention behind their action a good example to sort of make sense of this definition and the difference between bribes and gratitude gratuities and bribes are one of the same thing but they're different aren't they gratuity is given as a form of saying thank you very much it was given anyways if you did something or not it doesn't really have the intention behind it to mold your behavior the intention is just to show appreciation the outcome of your action is not important it

is appreciation for your action these gratuities are given out to place all the time police get some free coffee at tim horton a free burger at mcdonald's maybe people let them in front of them at a line-up in you know grocery store it happens all the time it happens to us too there's none police a student gets a professor a box of chocolate you know you get your boss said and a bottle of whiskey feels like that right bribes are different aren't they bribes are given as a way of encouraging you to do something or

not do something in other words bribe brightness given in order to change your behavior you see if you get your profit box of chocolate and the prophet says thank you the intention is to say thanks to the prophet for having being a good prophet all year long and the process thank you very much i enjoy this job that might be okay but if the prophet's accepting the box of chocolate and in return is gonna increase your grade that's a bright this is what we mean by intentions you see there are those who say that gratuities

are not necessarily a good thing either but the intention doesn't matter it is the action that the police should not be accepting you know in a free burger mcdonald's a free coffee at tim horton because they say it's a slippery slope you know maybe the police gets used to it will start expecting it then when it is not offered they get mad they don't do their actions on other hand people see well maybe it's a way to build communities you know giving a free coffee to a police officer may be a way of saying hey

thanks a lot we appreciate you in our community maybe it's a way of building relationships getting that police officer to come by now they meet everyone in the lineup who's in the community the definition of a forwarded kind of helps us make sense of this in other words it doesn't the action itself becomes less important when an intention behind the action becomes important is the police officer showing up to that tim horton sooner and next time they have a call because they get free coffee there or is it that they get free coffee because i've

always been a good police officer i've always responded problem and this is just a way of saying thank you i'll leave that up to you to this side i don't know what the answer is but a bit of chief of police comes out and says i'm against police corruption they have to assume the sub what exactly they mean by police corruption now so in short sort of so far we have defined police corruption as an activity that has an intention behind it to further eat a private or departmental game in a legitimate way right okay

maybe we can look at that definition seems to be good enough the next question that we have to ask ourselves is what are the causes of police corruption well in the news you know sort of water cooler conversations around there seems to be the suggestion that we have this bad apple problem employees and there are a few bad apples that give a bad name to the rest of the police this definition is not useful for us this kind of explanation is not very useful for us on a number of levels one it doesn't make sense

but we look at it statistically police corruption exists in all levels of policing across all across the board and it seems systematic in other words you see the same action over and over and over again accepting bribes stealing on the job uh abuse of those who are not able to advocate for themselves excessive use of power those type of things we see them in all different forms of policing amongst all levels of policing so it cannot just be a bad apple problem it cannot just be a few bad apples problem furthermore the few bad apples

argument dismisses the notion imagine if you know air canada said listen yeah yeah yeah once in a while we have a pilot that crashes their plane into a mound but we just have a few bad apple pilot problems most of our pilots are not crashing their planes into mountains you wouldn't fly air canada for arkansas it's only a small percentage of our pilots who get drunk behind the wheel of the plane the rest of them are falling it's only about you know 12 15 20 percent of them you're gonna get in a plane so few

bad apple problems when you have a gun when you have the ability to arrest someone and take away their freedom mistakes are that high few bad apples is a problem another problem is that it doesn't take into account that if you have corruption at the higher level it corrupts the rest of it corrupts the rest of society across the rest of the police across the rest of the organization so it's not really true that oh it's just a few bad apple problem as if that dismisses the problem altogether that's not the case you're having an

institutional problem when people in a community come up against the police it's not against individual police officers it gets institution of police right so we have to take a look at some of the causes of corruption within this larger institution of police we can divide causes into two factors or some constant factors that are important discretion is number one isn't it discretion is one of the number one reasons that leads to police corruption it's not the argument of let's get rid of this question is it we heard this argument kind of when we were talking

to chief larkin too it's not about getting rid of discretion altogether no no no no suppose something more than that it's about the question of what we should do with police discretion because you see a police officer who's able to decide whom to charge and who not to charge a police officer can decide on whom to exercise their power line on whom they do not exercise it by by definition will be able to abuse that power take that into consideration it's not an argument against discretion it's just pointing out that it is police discretion take

out their gun or not take off how to define a particular situation that can make discretion a good thing or a bad thing low visibility of police both public and managerial low managerial visibility means that oftentimes the chiefs of police and the sergeants don't have a direct view of what the police is doing they often can't see what the individual officers are up to on daily basis on hourly basis a minute to minute basis most of you who work in uh jobs that you know if you're working a fast food job or an office or

something your imaging is there they're looking at you all the time but those of you who do work jobs like you imagine around you know maybe you work for the city kind of drive around truck uh pick up garbage you know clean up the parkings like that plant this stuff you know what i mean it's much easier to get away with not doing work when you don't have that visibility police also has very low public visibility oftentimes in places doing policing they corner off the area they don't let us close by to see what's going

on you can't really see what police is up to you don't have really easy access to police's body cams or their notes they have to sort of take police at their words it kind of reduces the availability of eyes on police availability of sort of public scrutiny on police this goes hand in hand and it gets exasperated by the sort of blue coat of silence blue wall of silence that exists in policing that prevents police officers from blowing the whistle on corruption in police sort of in our interview today for example for this lecture we

talk about what happens when police becomes whistleblowers what happens whistleblowers and police sort of when we talk about police as an organized group that looks an awful lot like a gang the secrecy becomes an important part of that definition sort of you know you don't rat on anyone we know for a fact that for example police officers who work in internal affairs those who police the police always look down upon by rest of the police doesn't that say something about an organization that looks down upon those who are there to police it last but not

least association of police by with criminals creates a fertile ground for this kind of activity there are also sort of variable factors factors are specific to groups of police for example we see more police corruption amongst police officers who work in communities that are unorganized there is a lot of uh sort of enemy in this community these are disorganized communities communities that can't advocate for themselves i can't look over the police that can't sort of keep police accountable for their actions we see much more corruption in those police in those communities poor communities communities that

have a large amount of recent immigrants large amount of people with uh not only lack of sort of monetary capital but also social and cultural capital what purdue talks about here we've talked about social and cultural capital before we see a lot of corruption in police that deals with vice crimes victimless crimes you know prostitution drug dealing things like that number one there's a lot of money involved number two but there are no victims it's much easier for police to be a corrupt because there's no one making a complaint okay so if we define a

police corruption as a form of as an intentional activity a lack of activity and if we see causes of police corruption as being uh sort of police abusing the discretionary power that they are given the secrecy that exists in policing then how can we deal with police corruption what there can be some practical aspects right we can pass through anti-corruption laws we can put anti-corruption policies into place we can make uh being a crop police officer uh much much easier to sort of fire a police cropped police officer so right now it's extremely difficult to

fire a corrupt police officer it's extremely difficult to fire police officers abuse their power mostly because they are protected by the police unions police holds us hostage as society if we don't allow the police to get what they want in the negotiation with their unions if we don't let the police get the qualified immunity that they want we don't let the police get sort of their ability to have to get paid for years while they're off duty because of a heinous act that they've come in police will go on strike police will not respond to

calls we need police to protect us so at one point police hold society hostage in order to push these demands okay so we have to be very cautious about that politically that's why it takes political motivation for us to turn around to a police union and say no no you work for us yes i'm not against police unions by any means i'm very pro-unions of that however no union of public servants should keep the rest of society hostage they shall not demand unreasonable demand and police unions in our country are demanding that the reason why

we can't fire a corrupt police officer the reason why a police officer who beats up and kills the suspect continues to get paid years after while they're off duty while they go on on when they go on paid to leave imagine if you found out that a teacher would abuse the child was on paid leave for five six seven eight ten years before the case was resolved you would be mad we should be mad at police for that too we should demand political change there too sure okay good body cameras that's a bad idea i

mean at the same time all these activities the body cameras on them you know sure why not uh for example let's take a look at some of you know independent investigation units that show up when police does when there's a police shooting there's an independent civilian investigation mostly formed by ex-police officers people connected to the police but why should that be the case shouldn't none police police the police it make sense to bring retired police officers to look after where the police did the right thing or not isn't there a conflict of interest why am

i bringing people from the same subcultures why should chiefs of police be picked amongst police officers it's an administrative job it doesn't require from the same be a police officer why can't you hire non-police officers as chiefs insert in some new blood at the top because if you keep insisting that we need to promote people from the bottom to the top by the time that console becomes a chief of police they be indoctrinated in the same culture that you're demanding for them to change maybe a better idea is inserting some new blood people from outside

of this subculture but we insert them at the bottom by hiring you know female police officers ethnic minority police officers at the bottom of the ladder we're hiring them on the top of the lag as chiefs as policy employees sure these external controls are amazing i liked them but then again i want to hire a police officer i trust i want to have a police officer i don't have to put a water camera that's the police officer i want so maybe another massive aspect of reducing police corruption is talk about police ethics talk about police

responsibility talk about police as a profession hiring ethical police officers i get about a dozen calls a year but uh you know people who want to become police officer and they put me down as a reference whatever they call me i say okay we have about 50 60 questions they're kind of multiple choice questions you know like does this person do x y and z very likely to not likely at all you know five or six or seven scale always i don't want to answer these questions let's talk and that's how you know usually we

get it our conversation going i see i know what you're really trying to ask you want to know if this person is an ethical person this is a good purse if when left to their own devices they choose the ethical way even if it's the hard way or does this person call corners they want to know if the person that's getting hired are they compassionate are they good decent human being are they nice yeah so maybe it's about ethics in policing maybe in police training instead of having you know 15 20 minutes 30 minutes of

those two three months four months a day devoted training uh devoted to training of ethics maybe we should teach our place up maybe we should get our police officers take a course in athens maybe having police educated police officers who come to social science programs like this is useful because they have learned about ethics they have learned about what is right and wrong and why it's important to do the right thing even if no one is watching why do you think we take plagiarism in this university so seriously why do you think moment you plagiarize

you will get the book thrown at you because we want to raise ethical people ethical students right so maybe one of the best way to reduce police corruption is in hiring practices another way to do it is to encourage so the sense of professionalism and police the idea that you as a police officer are responsible you have a professional duty you have a special dignity that you should not break this moment that you should not break that dignity that no matter how much gain you can get from some momentary act of corruption if that breaks

your sense of being a good police officer that's not the way to do it maybe not teaching that professional so let me do that in canada for example a police officer dies especially in the course of duty you have massive parades of police officers coming in from all over north america maybe all over the world to attend their funeral i've attended it i lived in a city in which a police officer died in the line of duty and her funeral was attended by police officers from across the globe australia england france united states mexico you

know anywhere from british columbia to newfoundland police officers showed up in their uniforms to line the streets as her coffin went by in the city people in the city came out this is to point out that we take you as a serious professional there is a pride to this professionalism and if we teach this pride to people to our police officers maybe they become well that's about it for this lecture as i said there is one more sort of conclusion in your lecture that it's coming up once you finish this one watch it's about 10-15

minutes long and there's a bonus mark associated with it all right i'll see you guys soon bye