Police Corruption

Exploring Police Deviance and Crime

Maurice Punch

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781843924104
• eBook ISBN: 9781134028146
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Policing and corruption are inseparable. This book argues that corruption is not one thing but covers many deviant and criminal practices in policing which also shift over time. It rejects the 'bad apple' metaphor and focuses on 'bad orchards', meaning not individual but institutional failure. For in policing the organisation, work and culture foster can encourage corruption. This raises issues as to why do police break the law and, crucially, 'who controls the controllers'?

Corruption is defined in a broad, multi-facetted way. It concerns abuse of authority and trust; and it takes serious form in conspiracies to break the law and to evade exposure when cops can become criminals. Attention is paid to typologies of corruption (with grass-eaters, meat-eaters, noble-cause); the forms corruption takes in diverse environments; the pathways officers take into corruption and their rationalisations; and to collusion in corruption from within and without the organization. Comparative analyses are made of corruption, scandal and reform principally in the USA, UK and the Netherlands.

The work examines issues of control, accountability and the new institutions of oversight. It provides a fresh, accessible overview of this under-researched topic for students, academics, police and criminal justice officials and members of oversight agencies.

Chapter 1

Introduction

A good police force is one that catches more criminals than it employs.

(Robert Mark, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in the 1970s, New Statesman 18 January 1980)

What is really real? Official paradigm and operational code(s)

Policing and corruption go hand in hand. That the two are inextricably linked is a grave matter because the police organisation is the prime agency of the state for law enforcement and social control (Reiner 2000; Loader and Walker 2007). The police are meant to enforce the law and not abuse it. This book explores that worrying but intriguing discrepancy between police as law enforcers and as lawbreakers. Why do officers bend and break rules, procedures and the law and why do some effectively become ‘criminals’? It takes a broad perspective on the elastic concept of ‘corruption’ – which I will define in Chapter 2 – but my position is that we have to abandon atomistic and limited definitions geared to ‘individual gain’ (Sherman 1974b 5).¹ These are rooted in legal notions of the autonomous individual and of corruption as primarily bribery. In contrast it is necessary to locate corruption within the wider context of misconduct, crime and organisational deviance in policing. It is sociologically unsound to speak of ‘individuals’ in organisations for there are none. This book is about ‘ordinary men’ placed in a peculiar institutional context where they are asked to perform dirty work; some remain clean, some become dirty, while others revel in the dirt.²

I shall argue that policing presents practitioners with an inherent dilemma in relation to performing their tasks and enforcing the law in a context of rules, resources and laws that restrict them in some way. This ‘impossible mandate’ (Manning 1977) fosters diverse forms and patterns of deviance and corruption which are related to achieving formally approved goals or covert, illicit ends. Of especial interest is the extent to which the wider environment of policing, the nature of the police organisation, police work and culture conspire to encourage the diverse forms of police deviance. And also to what extent the police organisation is weak, negligent or collusive in the prevention, deterrence and investigation of offences by the police. Given the nearly universal nature of police corruption and its resilience it is patently clear that reform and change in policing are problematic (Walker 2005). That requires, then, a consideration of the issues surrounding investigations of police deviance, prevention, leadership, reform campaigns and especially accountability. In a nutshell I argue that systemic corruption can become ‘organisational deviance’ so that we can no longer talk of ‘bad apples’ but rather of ‘rotten orchards’ (Punch 2003). In some cases, the extent of the deviance and the severity of its consequences, combined with the failure to deal with it, reach the level of ‘system failure’.

The book examines a number of cases of police corruption and the diverse forms it takes in several countries; it focuses on the pathways that officers take into corruption; and looks at the issues raised by trying to reform the police organisation and institutionalise accountability (Punch 2000). One strand in this work is the notion that policing is accountability and a corrupt police force is essentially unaccountable. This theme has been accentuated in the UK by the rise of new oversight agencies (Markham and Punch 2007a, 2007b). These have played an important role with the Office of Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland (OPONI), scrutinising the police in Northern Ireland following 30 years of unrest in the Province. In England and Wales the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), active since 2004, provided an independent agency that critically examined command procedures and also internal communication when the Metropolitan Police shot dead an innocent man during an antiterrorist operation in 2005 at Stockwell underground station (IPCC 2007a, 2007b; Punch and Markham 2009).

My analysis of deviance in police organisations will draw on the conceptual distinction between the ‘official paradigm’ and the ‘operational code’.³ In policing, the official paradigm is shaped to bolster institutional values, whereas the operational code espouses how things ‘really get done’. This distinction between official paradigm and operational code draws attention to the discrepancy between the public façade that police organisations present to the outside world and the negotiated reality of internal institutional and occupational practices which deviate from that paradigm. Behind the front designed to reassure the outside world there are diverse operational codes. For instance, British cops speak of being ‘bent for job’ or ‘bent for self’; the former is geared to enhancing formal goals – say in ensuring convictions in court through rule-bending – and the latter to rule-breaking for ends that are a perversion of the official paradigm. In all organisations there is an ‘informal system’, and one strand is the norms and practices that enhance formal goals while another is a subversive ‘under-culture’ that abuses and profits from the organisational context.

These distinctions alert us to the many-layered reality in police organisations where there are intricate and shifting patterns of meanings and behaviour between formal and informal ends and between deviance ‘for’ and ‘against’ the organisation (Punch 2008). Police deviance and corruption shift over time, and are complex, many-faceted and surrounded by ambiguity. The level and nature of deviance is also dependent on the opportunities provided and these vary within police agencies and between diverse environments. This institutional and occupational complexity makes unravelling what is ‘really real’ in policing a daunting enterprise. The underlying deviant practices have to be camouflaged and concealed to keep the official paradigm intact and to ward off external scrutiny; hence secrecy and deception are usually key features of corruption (Reiss 1971 6).⁴ From this perspective the often messy, confusing and frustrating reality of policing becomes a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of personal and institutional performances, of impression management and the construction of accounts for internal or external consumption. The actors at all levels have multiple personalities and identities and slip continually between them, espousing the official paradigm at one moment while acknowledging the operational code at another. Police officers learn to become shrewd and crafty chameleons, opportunistically and instinctively changing colour to fit the arena, audience, and shifting occupational roles. This makes cops no different from actors in other institutional settings (Dalton 1959); what does make them different is that they are law enforcers who have sworn an oath to abide by the law.

The official paradigm of policing is reflected in legal pronouncements about mandate and mission, strategy statements of individual forces and the speeches of police chiefs.⁵ The components of the paradigm that contemporary police organisations typically convey contain assertions about the espoused institutional ethos and expected standards of conduct of officers on the following lines.

Officers operate according to the rule of law and are answerable to the courts, aim to enforce the law impartially and apply their assigned monopoly of violence with restraint. They are publicly accountable for policy and operational decisions while cooperating with external oversight. They will provide a service to all citizens, treating them with dignity and respect and will abide by civil and human rights. And they will act with integrity, avoiding conflicts of interest and acceptance of gifts aimed at influencing conduct, eschewing nepotism and favouritism, and will promote standards of professional and ethical conduct. There is a link to the seven ‘fundamental values’ of democratic policing elucidated by Jones (2003: 606): equity, service delivery, responsiveness, distribution of power, information, redress and participation. There are too the ‘Nolan Principles’ enunciated by the Committee on Standards in Public Life founded in Britain in 1994 (Nolan 1998); the standards are centred on the principles of selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. With the intrusion of ‘new public management’ into policing (Leishman et al. 1966), moreover, these normative standards are often accompanied by claims of organisational excellence, speed and quality of response to demands from the public, espousing a ‘client-friendly’ approach and regularly monitoring public opinion on police performance.

In essence, then, the modern police organisation is held to be competent professionally, restrained in the use of its powers and force, legally compliant, responsive to oversight, open to the media, consultative with stakeholders in communities, humane and rights respecting, service and customer oriented but, above all, trustworthy and accountable. For instance, the Shared Leadership Vision of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP 1998) espouses ‘core values’ of accountability, respect, professionalism, honesty, compassion and integrity.

If these values are taken as a template but then we hear of officers ‘testilying’ in court, fabricating statements, tampering with evidence, pressurising a suspect into a false confession or subduing a suspect with excessive force and covering this up, this conveys a stark discrepancy between rhetoric and reality. In Australia in the 1980s, for example, a corrupt cop drove a criminal associate to and from an armed burglary while other corrupt cops attended the scene to cover up for them. In the Sydney ‘gang land wars’ there were shootouts between rival groups of criminals and ‘bent’ cops; allegedly an officer murdered someone and then investigated his own crime while corrupt cops ‘fitted up’ innocent people for their own murders.⁶ This conduct leads to shock and outrage because expectations of the police are based on trust and when that trust is abused there is a special sense of betrayal. The deviation from espoused norms and the law is a serious violation of a ‘fiduciary relationship, the corruption of a public trust, of public virtue’ (Reiss 1977 ix, emphasis in original).

Yet a wealth of material – in academic publications, historical accounts, public inquiries, documentaries and media exposures, court cases, biographies of officers and films – reveals that police officers frequently if not routinely bend and break disciplinary rules and the law. This is a recurring and persistent theme since the commencement of ‘modern’ public policing early in the nineteenth century. The combined historical and contemporary evidence indicates that police can be venal and violent and can behave irresponsibly while evading accountability.

Indeed, when police research developed in the US in the 1960s – pioneered by several researchers and aided by a number of public inquiries – it portrayed the police as a problem profession characterised by violence, prejudice and corruption.⁷ This was reinforced by negative images of baton-wielding police during civil rights and anti-Vietnam demonstrations, leading to the term ‘police riot’ (Kerner Report 1968). Clearly, then, behind that façade of official presentations conveying a compliant, responsible and controlled institution there are other realities driven by covert codes. For instance, police officers in Albany (New York) would go on patrol with tools to carry out burglaries; they also stole car tyres and batteries (Christianson 1973). There were police burglary rings in several other cities in both the US and the UK (Punch 1985: 10). People in Chicago were blasé about police misconduct but even they were disturbed when their cops became ‘Burglars in Blue’ (Rokyo 1971: 111). The exposure of police as burglars is glaringly at odds with the official paradigm and with public expectations. This is especially the case with one of the defining images of police deviance in recent decades.

In the infamous Rodney King incident, a citizen with a video-camera filmed officers from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) during an arrest. In the recording officers give a prolonged beating to a black man lying on the ground. What is not visible on the tape shown on TV is that King had strongly resisted arrest. He had earlier tried to evade arrest and this started a car chase that involved some ten patrol cars (Skolnick and Fyfe 2005). There was a helicopter overhead, some 20 LAPD officers were at the scene of the arrest and they watched and shouted encouragement while four of them repeatedly kicked and stomped on King, beat him with metal batons and twice used a ‘taser’ on him (Collins 2008: 322–4). This was a shocking event and the graphic images attracted worldwide attention. The repercussions of the King case set off widespread rioting in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the US; crucially the violence was viewed as symbolic for the police mistreatment of blacks throughout America. But the official paradigm of a restrained, impartial and law-abiding police force was shattered by those images.

The tape exposed the largely concealed ‘backstage’ of policing. What was most disturbing to viewers and commentators was that the officers conducted the beating as if it was ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ (SOP).⁸ Indeed, the Christopher Commission (1991), which investigated the King incident, concluded that a significant number of LAPD officers employed excessive violence, that among these were a group of ‘repeat offenders’ who were not identified as such by the organisation, and that there was a wider institutional failure within the LAPD’s management in handling complaints and exercising accountability. The analysis of critical incidents in policing frequently exposes that there is a wider pattern to the deviance, that this has not been dealt with by the organisation and that the institution has displayed negligence, denial and even collusion in the illicit practices.

How can this failure be explained? How can the violent beating of King happen within an accountable and disciplined public agency with ostensibly a semi-military and bureaucratic structure of control? How, indeed, does that institution go about exerting internal control and investigating offences among its personnel? Which paths do officers follow into deviance and in what social arrangements do they become involved? How do they justify the deviance to themselves? How after scandal are police agencies reformed? How indeed is external control of policing exercised? And, finally, how is accountability arranged and exercised?

For one of the most pivotal issues in policing remains quis custodiet ipsos custodies – who controls the controllers?⁹ There is a general notion in democratic governance that it is undesirable that any public agency investigates itself. This holds particularly for policing because police have the authority to intervene directly in citizens’ lives, to deprive them of their freedom and even to take their lives through fatal force. These are uniquely extensive powers and their implementation should surely be subject to independent oversight and transparency. Yet until quite recently the situation in the UK was that there was no external agency to investigate the police; for 175 years police investigated themselves. And it could be argued that that is still largely the case.¹⁰

The key questions above form the perennial, contentious issues which this book will address; it also explores features of reform and accountability in policing. In the UK, for instance, the architecture of police accountability has altered considerably with the arrival of OPONI in Northern Ireland in 2000 and the IPCC in England and Wales in 2004.¹¹ In the US, in contrast, the picture remains sombre; for many years there has been considerable hostility among police officers and their representatives to any form of civilian oversight. Some new, promising developments are sketched by Walker (2005).

In this work the official paradigm in policing will, then, be taken to mean the formal structure and the institutional ideology, encapsulating how the organisation wants to appear to the outside world. And the operational code(s) will refer to the diverse practices that deviate from that paradigm and from public expectations.¹² This institutional split personality echoes the lapidary study of managers by Dalton (1959) where, beneath the surface of the corporation, managers were breaking rules all the time. This double life of overt compliance with covert manipulation is evident in Gouldner’s (1954) study of a gypsum mine; in Bittner (1965) on the infinite regress of rules in organisations and the muddle in interpreting them; in the ‘vicious circles’ encountered in institutions (Masuch 1985); and in the ‘moral mazes’ that executives have to negotiate in corporations (Jackall 1988). It is graphically evident in Geis’ (1996) classic study of white-collar crime. The personally law-abiding managers constructed strategic conspiracies to fix prices; they saw it as SOP for conducting business, erased the fact that it was illegal and never thought of themselves as ‘criminals’ – until their arrest, and e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 What is corruption?
• 3 The US: from pad to crew
• 4 The Netherlands: Amsterdam and the ‘IRT’ affair
• 5 The UK: London, miscarriages of justice and Northern Ireland
• 6 ‘Creatures in between’: pathways into police deviance and corruption
• 7 Scandal, reform and accountability
• 8 Conclusion: sticky fingers and dirty hands
• Appendix: What can be done?
• References
• Index