Corruption within police departments falls into two basic categories, external corruption and internal corruption. For an internal act to occur, three distinct elements of police corruption must be present: misuse of authority, misuse of official capacity, and misuse of personal (Dantzker 157). It can be said that power inevitably tends to corrupt, and while there is no reason to suppose that police officer as individuals are any less fallible than other members of society, people are often shocked and outraged when police officer are exposed violating the law.

External corruption usually consists of one or more of the following: Payoffs to police by non-criminal elements who fail to abide by stringent statutes or city ordinances. Payoffs to police by indiv

A scandal is perceived as a socially constructed experience that can lead to realignments in the structure of power within organizations. New York, for instance, has had more than a half dozen major scandals in its police department this century. It was the Knapp Commission in 1972 that first brought awareness to the NYPD when they released the results of a two-year investigation of alleged corruption. The findings were that bribery, especially among narcotics officers, was extremely high. As a result many officers were prosecuted and many more lost their jobs. A massive re-structuring took place afterwards with strict rules and policy to make sure that the problem would never happen again.

Controlling corruption is the only way that we can really limit corruption, because corruption is the by-product of the individual police officer, societal views and police environmental factors. Therefore control must come from not only the police department, but also must require support of the community members. It is important that the public be educated to the negative affects of corruption on the police. The community may even go as far as establishing review boards, and investigative bodies to help keep a careful eye on the agency. If we do not act to try and control it, the costs can be enormous, because it affects the individual, his department, and the community as a whole (Sherman 150).

However, in May 1992 Michael Dowd and four other New York officers and one former officer were arrested for drug trafficking by police in Long Island. When the arrests hit the papers, it was forehead-slapping time among police brass. Not only had some of their cops become robbers, but also the crimes had to be uncovered by a suburban police force, which proved to be very embracing to the City of New York. Politicians and the media started asking what had happened to the system for rooting out bad cops established 21 years ago

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