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. Pay

The Mollen Commission has not uncovered a citywide organization of payoffs among the 30,000-member force as the Knapp Commission did 21 years earlier. In fact, testimony only focused on three precincts, all in heavy crime areas. But the tales, nevertheless, were troubling. Dowd described how nearly the entire precinct patrol force would meet at times at an isolated location, where they would drink, shoot off guns in the air and plan their illegal drug raids. (James 3)

“The cops who were engaged in corruption 20 years ago took money to cover up the criminal activity of others,'’ says Michael Armstrong, who was chief counsel to the Knapp Commission. “ Now it seems cops have gone into competition with street criminals.” (Beals 18) For cops as for anyone else, money invites corruption. Gambling syndicates in the 1950s were protected by a payoff system more elaborate than the Internal Revenue Service. Pervasive corruption may have lessened in recent years, as many believe, but individual examples seem to have grown more shocking.

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).

Some topics in this essay:
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