Abstract
This chapter addresses the context for and the nature of integrity among the Estonian police—a police agency with a long but disrupted history. The data on police corruption are based on a study carried out among the Public Order Police in Estonia in 2013. One hundred and nine respondents provided their opinions about 11 hypothetical cases of police misconduct, including seriousness of misconduct, appropriate and expected discipline for such misconduct, and the extent to which such misconduct would be protected by the code of silence. The findings suggest that, although all of the scenarios studied were seen as relatively serious, strongly believed to be violations of organizational rules, and dismissal was seen most often as the appropriate and expected outcome for such behaviors, there was a considerable reluctance toward reporting such behaviors. These results echo a wider tendency in Estonian society, namely a considerable reluctance to report corruption.
I gratefully acknowledge the feedback given by Priit Suve for the chapter during its composition stage as well as the help provided by Sanja Kutnjak Ivković and Maria R. Haberfeld during the editorial process.
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Notes
- 1.
The Civil Service Act (2012) is applied to the police with specifications provided for by specific laws differentiates between officials (a person who is in the public-law service) and employees (recruited for the job in an authority, which does not involve the exercise of official authority but only work in support of the exercise of official authority and working under an employment contract).
- 2.
One should note that in 2014, the Freedom House (2014) rating continues to be “free” and the country has been democratic for 23 years.
- 3.
On the scale from 1 to 100 following an updated methodology that has been used since the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index 2012 (Transparency International 2012).
- 4.
A city located at the eastern extreme point of Estonia in the Ida-Viru County in Northeast Estonia.
- 5.
Abuse of authority is not considered as corruption in its classic sense in Estonia and thus viewed separately in statistics (Sööt 2011).
- 6.
Out of these twelve cases, was charged with accepting gratuities, four for accepting a bribe, one for accepting a bribe by a group, one for arranging the receipt of gratuities, one for granting of gratuities, and four for counterfeiting or falsifying documents (Ministry of Justice 2013).
- 7.
For the sake of simplicity, the respondents are referred to as “police officers” when discussing the results of the survey.
- 8.
On the five-point scale, where five denoted “definitely report.”
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Vallmüür, B. (2015). Police Integrity in Estonia. In: Kutnjak Ivković, S., Haberfeld, M. (eds) Measuring Police Integrity Across the World. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2279-6_5
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