Abstract
Despite the fact that it resists definition and invites serious misunderstanding, integrity is an idea worth preserving. The role that it plays better than any other word is to make possible discussions with police that in other terms would prove difficult if not impossible. However, like other extremely useful words, it runs the risk of meaning so much to so many that it ends up meaning very little to anyone. This would be most unfortunate because “integrity” also has some exceptionally valuable, but rather subtle additional powers that ought to be preserved. To save it from a fate of pleasant meaninglessness and to expose some of its considerable powers, we offer a detailed definition.
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References
William Graham Sumner, Folkways (Boston: Ginn, 1906).
George W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge: Addison-Wesley, 1954).
George C. Homans, The Human Group, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950) p. 123.
See Carl Klockars, “The Dirty Harry Problem” in Carl B. Klockars and Stephen Mastrofski, Thinking about Police. 2nd Edition. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1991), pp. 413–423; Edwin J. Delattre, Character and Cops: Ethics in Policing. Third Edition: (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1996); and John P. Crank and Michael A. Caldero, The Corruption of the Noble Cause. (Cincinnati, OH: Anderson, 2000).
Carl B. Klockars, “A Theory of Excessive Force and Its Control,” in William A. Geller and Hans Toch, Police Violence: Understanding and Controlling Police Abuse of Force (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 8.
This point was made forcefully by Herman Goldstein in his groundbreaking “Policing a Free Society” (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1977), p. 188.
Gary Sykes, “Street Justice,” Justice Quarterly, Vol. 3. No. 4, Carl Klockars, “Street Justice: Some Micro-Moral Reservations” Justice Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 4, December 1986, pp. 513–517.
Histories of police that document the abiding prevalence of corruption are too numerous to list here. The most thorough scholarly explorations of the temptations to corruption in contemporary policing include G. Marx, Surveillance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); M. Punch, Conduct Unbecoming: The Social Construction of Police Deviance and Control (London: Tavistock, 1986); P K. Manning and L. Redlinger, “The Invitational Edges of Police Construction,” in C. Klockars and S. Mastrofski (Eds.) Thinking about Police (New York: McGraw Hill, 1993) pp. 398–412; L. W. Sherman, Scandal and Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978, and J. Rubinstein, City Police (New York: Ballinger, 1973).
The for gain dimension of corruption typically distinguishes it from other forms of police misconduct such as brutality. There is, however, debate over whether the definition of police corruption should include various forms of the use of police authority for political, organizational, or strategic gain. See C. Klockars and S. Mastrofski (Eds.) op. cit.; C. Klockars, Thinking about Police (New York: McGraw-Hill. 1983); L. Sherman, Scandal and Reform (Berkeley: Univ. Of California Press, 1978); H. Goldstein, Policing a Free Society (Cambridge: Ballinger, 1977), and H. Goldstein, Police Corruption: Perspective on its Nature and Control (Washington, D.C.: The Police Foundation, 1975).
See W. K. Muir, Police: Streetcorner Politicians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977 and E. Stoddard in C. Klockars (ed.) op. cit.
It is for this reason that much of what is known about corruption has been learned from high-profile investigations of police agencies with serious and systemic corruption problems; see, for example, The Pennsylvania Crime Commission, Report on Police Corruption and the Quality of Law Enforcement in Philadelphia (1974); The Knapp Commission, Report on Police Corruption (New York: George Brazillier, 1972); The City of New York Commission to Investigate Allegations of Police Corruption and the Anti-Corruption Procedures of the Police Department, Commission Report (1994).
All three commissions investigating allegations of corruption—the Knapp Commission, the Pennsylvania Commission, and the Mollen Commission—reported that the respective police agencies rarely, if at all, used proactive techniques (Knapp, op. cit. p. 208; Pennsylvania, op. cit., p. 483; Mollen, op. cit., p. 101). However, the commissions themselves used proactive techniques extensively. One of the most common techniques was the use of “turned” police officers. These police officers were either caught when offered a bribe by a member of a commission investigative team or caught when accepting a bribe given by somebody else, and they subsequently, under the threat of prosecution, worked as undercover officers and/or later testified against other police officers (See, e.g., Knapp, op. cit. pp. 52, 58; Pennsylvania, op. cit., pp. 483–484; Mollen, op. cit., pp. 11–14).
On the general topic of integrity testing in the workplace see Katrin U. Byford, “Comment: The Quest for the Honest Worker: A Proposal for Regulation of Integrity Testing,” 49 Southern Methodist University Law Review (1996); Quentin Collin Faust, “Note: Integrity Tests: Do They Have Any Integrity?” 6 Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy (1996); Michael B. Metzger and Dan R. Dalton, “‘Just Say No’ to Integrity Testing,” 4 University of Florida Journal of Law and Public Policy (1991).
The capacity to predict police integrity from psychological testing is extremely limited: J.E. Taller and LD. Hinz, Performance Prediction of Public Safety and Law Enforcement Personnel (Springfield, Ill: C. Thomas, 1990); E.J. Delattre, Character and Cops (Washington, D.C.: The American Enterprise Institute, 1989); J, Malouff and N.S. Schutte, “Using Biographical Information to Hire the Best New Police Officers,” (1980) Journal of Police Science and Administration 14: 256–67; R.E. Daley, “The Relationship of Personality Variables to Suitability for Police Work,” (1980) DAI 44:1551–69. R. D. Morrison, “Officer Psychological Profiling” (1996),Lawand Order, April, 1996, Pp. 93–94; S. F. Curran, “Pre-employment Psychological Evaluation of Law Enforcement Applicants”, The Police Chief, October 1998, Pp. 88–94
The analytical assault on the understanding of corruption as a problem of individually defective police offers was begun by Goldstein in, op. cit. (1975) and continued in Goldstein, op. cit. (1977). It has, however, taken more than a two decades for most U.S. police agencies to begin to act upon Goldstein’s pioneering analysis.
R. J. McCormack, Corruption in the Subculture of Policing: An Empirical Study of Police-Officer Perceptions. (1986) Unpublished Ph.. D. Dissertation. See also Muir, op. cit.
T. Barker and R. O. Wells,. “Police Administrators’ Attitudes toward Definition and Control of Police Deviance,” FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. (1982) 51(4): 8–16.
Although this understanding is the tacit assumption of virtually all historical studies of police, it received, to our knowledge, its first systematic exploration by A. J. Reiss, Jr. and D.J. Bordua in “Environment and Organization: A Perspective on the Police” in D. Bordua, The Police: Six Sociological Essays (ed.) (New York: John Wiley, 1967) and in A. J. Reiss, Jr., The Police and the Public (New Haven: Yale University Press:, 1971). The specific application of these principles to police corruption was first advanced by Goldstein in his Police Corruption (1975) and later in his Policing a Free Society (1977).
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(2006). The Idea of Police Integrity. In: Enhancing Police Integrity. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-36956-3_1
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