Police Misconduct Case Study

Police Misconduct

With all the authority and power that is gained by being a police officer, the job is bound to attract a few individuals looking to take advantage. While recruiting, the police aim to weed out those unfit for the job and its included responsibilities, but no system is perfect. Sometimes there are officers that take advantage of the system, just like people may do in any other job.

Rotten Apples The rotten apple theory suggests that there are only a few problem police officers in a force. They can be either individuals who slipped into their deviant ways because of the environment they worked in and how easy it was to take advantage of their job, or deviant individuals who continue their deviant ways in an environment that

833), as well as polygraph examinations (p. 835). However, when individuals slip through these tests and into the police force other safeguards are needed to stop individuals from taking advantage. According to Rudy many officers do not like working with misconduct so they will report it if there are major problems (personal communications, November 11, 2015). Misconduct makes other officers look bad as well as the precinct so if there are rotten apples in an otherwise good group they would get reported. However, if an individual does something stupid/ minor police may not necessarily report that officer, because it is like if you see someone cheating on a quiz, you don’t always tell on them, how would that make you look (Rudy, personal communications, November 11, 2015)? With officer reporting they also have warning systems set in place to detect possible misconduct, which might help more in terms of the organized misconduct. These systems keep track of each officer in terms of statistics such as citizen complaints or overtime hours logged. To many citizen complaints can raise suspicion because if they are doing their job correctly, an officer should be making the general public happy. While with overtime, too much of it can mean that the officer is worn out, or having personal troubles such as needing more money (Rudy, personal communications, November 11, 2015). Both of these may influence an officer, making him much more likely to commit misconduct. So monitoring this can alert higher authorities to