Comparing Police Corruption

Bulgaria, Germany, Russia and Singapore

Leslie Holmes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000457339
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Corruption & Misconduct
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyses police corruption across four country case studies, exploring how the problem manifests in each country and how it can be reduced.

The problem of police corruption ranges from having to pay a bribe to a traffic cop to avoid a speeding fine, right up to more serious forms, such as collusion with organised crime groups and terrorists. The issue therefore constitutes a significant security threat and a human rights issue, but it is often difficult to understand the extent of the problem, and how it varies across contexts. This book analyses the corruption situation in Bulgaria, Germany, Russia and Singapore, identifies similarities and differences across them, and analyses the various means of addressing the problem: punitive, incentivising, technological, administrative and imaging, and the role of civil society. Drawing on existing literature and research, the book also makes extensive use of local sources and original survey data across the four countries.

As comparative literature on police corruption remains rare, this book's survey of the situation in two developed states and two post-communist transition states will be of considerable interest to students and researchers across corruption studies, criminology, police studies and security studies, as well as practitioners working in anti-corruption and law enforcement agencies.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003156871-1

Police corruption matters. While once considered a problem primarily of less economically developed states – what some call the ‘Global South’ – it has become increasingly obvious in recent decades that, like most forms of corruption, it is also a major issue in developed states. Yet an observation made just over a decade ago suggests that the issue has been slow to reach the agendas of many parts of the world that should know better:

The topic of corruption in police forces is rarely discussed in most EU Member States. The review of official reports on corruption and interviews with representatives of public institutions of EU Member States indicates that police corruption is considered an incidental phenomenon.

Philip Gounev and Tihomir Bezlov (2010: 80)

There are at least 11 reasons why it is of significance, and hence why it demands further research and greater awareness-raising. The first is that, according to Transparency International’s (TI’s) 2013 Global Corruption Barometer (GCB), respondents from 107 countries perceived the police to be second only to political parties in terms of corruption levels (Hardoon and Heinrich 2013: 16). Furthermore, more people around the world who had come into contact with state officials in the previous 12 months had paid bribes to police officers than to any other agents of the state (Hardoon and Heinrich 2013: 3 and 11). In the most recent complete GCB (9th), the police were seen as the joint (along with elected representatives) most corrupt branch of the state apparatus worldwide (Pring 2017: 5). In short, the public in many (most?) countries are more likely to be directly impacted by police corruption than by that of any other officers of the state.

Second, the police in many countries are armed, unlike most other state officials, and can therefore threaten and actually deploy violent means to pressure citizens into collaborating in corrupt acts or else – in a more common scenario – not to report police corruption and collusion. While, unlike the approach of some commentators (see below), police brutality per se is not treated here as a form of corruption, it can relate to corruption for the reason just elaborated.¹ A third way in which police officers typically differ from most other state officials is that the nature of their work (e.g. undercover) often necessitates much greater secrecy – and hence less transparency and public accountability – than is typical of other functionaries. In an oft-cited equation or formula, Robert Klitgaard (1998: 4; see too Klitgaard 1988: 75) argued that C = M + D − A, where C stands for corruption, M for monopoly, D for discretion, and A for accountability: we shall return to this equation in a subsequent chapter. For now, the relative lack of accountability of many police officers sets them apart.

Undercover work is typical of police activity relating to organised and other forms of serious crime, which leads to our fourth point, namely, that many officers come into direct and frequent contact with criminals (including even terrorists), and thus have opportunities to collude that are less common for most other officers of the state. Sofia Jonsson has analysed the relationship between corrupt police officers and human traffickers, arguing that the latter operate essentially on the basis of cost-benefit analyses, and that police corruption in countries of origin reduces their costs in three ways – by returning escaped victims to their traffickers (thus lowering recruitment costs); by protecting the traffickers from detection and prosecution by turning a blind eye in return for bribes; and by making victims lose their trust in the police, so that they are far less likely to turn to law enforcement authorities in destination countries for assistance (Jonsson 2019: 110). This point about opportunities for collusion can be exemplified from two of the countries chosen as cases for this book. Thus, the Bulgarian minister of internal affairs was in April 2008 required to resign after two senior police officers he had appointed were arrested for alleged ties to organised crime gangs (Tanasoiu and Racovita 2012: 256). Immediately following the September 2004 Beslan school siege in Russia in which more than 330 people – most of them children – were killed, there were allegations that corrupt police officers had colluded with the terrorist hostage-takers (Murphy 2004; Yasmann 2004; McEvers 2005), while President Putin himself, as well as Russian parliamentarians, hinted at such collusion (Putin 2004).

In some cases, collusion can mutate into a situation whereby officers who once ‘merely’ cooperated with OCGs (organised crime groups) actually join them. Our fifth point, then, is that police officers who have lost their positions because of changes in government policy (i.e. as distinct from being dismissed for misconduct) sometimes become members of OCGs. This is particularly evident in a number of post-communist states. During the 1990s, new governments in many CEE, SEE and FSU states sought to distance themselves from their authoritarian Communist predecessors in numerous ways, including attempting to overcome the reputation of running a police state.² In doing so, many substantially reduced the size of their police and secret police forces. For example, between 12,000 and 17,000 police officers lost their jobs in Bulgaria in the early 1990s (Dzhekova et al. 2013: 100), and many subsequently joined OCGs (Gounev and Bezlov 2010: 206 and 220–1; see too Holmes 2020: esp. 101–2).

Sixth, the police also differ from other officers of the state in that they are supposed to be the ‘final port of call’ for most people – the ones they can most trust. It is appropriate to note here that one NYPD Commissioner defined a corrupt police officer simply as one ‘who violates his [sic] trust’ (cited in Bahn 1975: 31). If a local council official is demanding bribes before s/he will issue building permits, members of the public should be able to feel confident that reporting this to the police will result in an unbiased and thorough investigation: they should not have to be concerned that the police will collude with the council official to sweep misconduct under the carpet. Yet it will be demonstrated in this study that groups of police officers sometimes themselves act like OCGs. It was because of this widespread phenomenon in his country that the then president of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Medvedev, referred in 2010 to ‘raiders in epaulettes’ (Petrov 2010) and vowed to counter this phenomenon, while the Russian minister of internal affairs stated publicly in the previous year that sections of the police had become ‘criminal businesses’ (Galpin 2009). A 2017 report noted that Bulgaria had the lowest level among the 28 EU member states of citizen trust that the police would be able and willing to deal with corruption, and that the police (along with customs) were considered the most corrupt branch of the state (European Commission 2017: 6, 22 and 106).

Police officers often have access to confidential data held on citizens or companies and can abuse their privileged position by selling some of these to those willing to pay for insider information. One example of this is where OCGs pay bribes to officers to acces...