Police corruption in New York City Research Paper

Police corruption in New York City - Research Paper Example Introduction Police corruption is a type police misconduct through which police officers seeks personal advantage or gain like career advancement or money, through abusing power, e.g. accepting inducement or bribes in exchange for selectively pursuing or not pursuing and arrest or investigation. Accurate or precise information concerning the prevalence of corruption by police is not easy to come by because the corruption practices happen in private and secrets, in addition, police departments have very little incentive to publish corruption information. Researchers as well as police officials have argued that in most state police departments, large scale police corruption not only prevail, but have also been institutionalized. Some of the general police corruption acts prevalent in police state departments include: corruption of authorities, kickbacks, opportunistic thefts, shakedowns, protection of illegal activity, fixing, direct criminal activities, internal payoffs, police hazing, frameup, an d ticket fixing among others. New York is one state where police corruption has been noted in masses, and therefore this paper seeks to discuss the police corruption in New York City. Examples of police corruption activities and event in New York City include: NYPD subway sodomy scandal; kidnapping, robbery and torture of drug dealer; NYPD Muslim surveillance controversy; NYPD rape cops scandal; the 2011 ticket fixing scandal; Tompkins Square Park riot; Mafia cops; and various shooting and arrests among others (Hopson 12). Corruption incidences in New York City Since the founding of New York Police Department in 1844, scandals of corruption have warranted investigations by commissions about every twenty years right at the beginning by the 1894 Lexow Committee, the 1914 Curran Committee, the 1932 Seabury Commission, the 1949 Helfand Commission, the 1970 Knapp Commission, and the 1993 Mollen Commission. Almost until 1980's, police corruption often involved some form of extortion or vi ce consisting of payments to officers in order to escape arrest or prosecution for a crime or a violation. In the early 1970s and late 1960's, narcotic police corruption emerged. Police officers discovered that the small amounts of money relatively obtained from the shakedown were almost nothing in comparison to the hundreds and thousands of dollars obtained from narcotics shakedowns. In practice, the large amounts of money temptation available from drug trafficking is a major challenge facing the New York Police Department and the New York City entirely. This has prompted numerous discoveries of possible solutions to the predicament: having more supervisory positions within the police department would increase the oversight of subordinate officers; hiring procedures and practices with ability to screen out all but the best police candidates maximize the pool of police officers with good conduct and character; higher salaries for police officers would reduce the attraction to drug m oney; and increased external and internal police monitoring would increase the awareness of the tempted police officers of the likelihood of detecting corrupt behavior and severely punished. However, the police corruption acts are still witnessed and detected in New York City (Lawrence 14). New York Police officers have experienced allegations of taking bribes recently in order to help family and friends get out of traffic and parking violations by losing their paperwork. For reasons of various police corruption cases that arise, NYPD has reallocated into police department, lawyers responsible for trials against New York police officers. The over 400 police officers indicted in these allegations apparently accused of throwing away summons paperwork in order to prevent tickets from ending up at the adjudicating agencies. The paperwork often vanishes mysteriously over night shifts before processing, which kills the trail of the ticket. In some cases, documents are changed in order to reflect