Abstract
Over the last six decades, a number of sensational incidents involving police corruption, brutality, and serious misconduct have brought these isolated events to the forefront of the national media and created public outcry demanding appropriate judicial attention, enhanced professionalism, and policy reform. Extreme incidents such as the Los Angeles Police Department confrontation with Rodney King and the brutal attack of criminal suspect Abner Louima at the hands of New York City Police Department officers in a police station have resulted in the excessive scrutiny of police leadership, organizational accountability, and professional standards. Many of the more notorious allegations of police deviance involving the New York City Police Department, the Los Angeles Police Department, and other American law enforcement agencies will be described and analyzed in detail. Understanding trends in police deviance since the 1960s and lapses in organizational ethical and professional standards over that time frame will potentially provide insight into criminological and sociological explanations and prospective policy reform measures.
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Notes
- 1.
The author was hired by the NYPD in January 1984 with more than 2200 other police officers, after having served more than two years as a volunteer NYPD auxiliary police officer.
- 2.
Integrity tests evaluate a police officer’s reaction to found currency or narcotics and ensure that legal and police department procedural guidelines are complied with. Most tests are randomly administered but can also be conducted on targeted police officers when there is suspicion that they may be engaging in thefts or other criminality.
- 3.
Drug tests can also be administered for cause when there is reasonable suspicion that the police employee has smoked or ingested illegal narcotics.
- 4.
This would permit a potential police candidate to have served 4 years in the military or complete a bachelor’s degree.
- 5.
When a police officer, detective, sergeant, or lieutenant applied for a position within the NYPD’s Detective Bureau, Narcotics Division, or other criminal investigative units, the Internal Affairs Bureau (IAB) received “first choice” in transferring that applicant to the IAB to ensure that the IAB had experienced investigative staff and management.
- 6.
The author was a supervisor within the NYPD’s research and planning units from 1990 through 1994, and his firsthand exposure to the various elements of community policing from its inception in the early 1980s through his promotion to police station commander at the turn of the millennium makes it difficult to reference many aspects since programmatic elements and statistics were obtained while in service and were common knowledge to NYPD practitioners, particularly those in executive ranks.
- 7.
The author recognizes that there may be other contributing factors that have supported the dramatic drop in crime in New York City and across the United States since 1993, which include relative economic stability and low unemployment rate, decrease in the American juvenile and adolescent populations, increased incarceration and lengthened prison terms, notable decline in crack cocaine usage and addiction, more effective treatment in the correctional and probationary environments, enhanced use of technology (e.g., DNA analysis, video surveillance, etc.) to prevent and solve crime, etc.
- 8.
As a tenured police commander or deputy police commander in different police stations, the author personally experienced positive results in drops in crime and increased arrests of criminal suspects by strategically deploying police resources to areas where crime patterns and trends had developed. Although refuted by some, the author believes that there is a direct relationship between the crime analysis/proactive enforcement model of policing and the sharp reduction in index crime rate.
- 9.
In 1990, all NYPD police station commanders were tasked with chairing the monthly “Community Council Meetings ” that were held directly in each police station and that were open to all precinct residents and business persons. The purpose of these gatherings was to allow all members of the public to relay their concerns and complaints directly to the police station commander, who in 1994 was given the new responsibility as problem-solving coordinator for the jurisdiction. Three members of each Precinct Community Council would sit with the police station commander and the community policing unit commander and identify the three primary “problems” that police personnel would address over the next 30-day period.
- 10.
The Terry v. Ohio (392 US 1 [1968]) decision by the US Supreme Court in 1968 directed that police officers across the United States could stop suspects, even forcefully if necessary, if they had reasonable suspicion that the suspect had been, is presently, or would be engaging in criminal conduct and, in addition, that police officers could frisk those suspects if they reasonably suspected that those individuals may be armed.
- 11.
Advocates for some minority groups have repeatedly alleged that since the percentage of minority group members that have been stopped by the police during these constitutionally permissible “Terry” encounters has exceeded the percentage of African-Americans or Blacks in the general population, that these police actions should be considered to be evident of disparate or discriminatory law enforcement practices. The police across the United States have generally stated, however, that African-Americans, Blacks, and Hispanics in many cities and jurisdictions disproportionally engage in a greater proportion of serious and violent crimes and that police officers working within these communities are merely reacting to crime trends and public demands.
- 12.
This is also noted in other tight-knit and dangerous professions such as firefighting and in the military services.
- 13.
What the author and most police officers have come to realize is that those who engage in the isolated events of police deviance tarnish the reputation of every officer working in that agency. It is therefore in the agency’s best interests to proactively counsel or to terminate these individuals as soon as possible.
- 14.
This event and the resultant counterterrorism responsibilities have not significantly affected police integrity, ethics, or deviance, other than concerns regarding the implementation of the Patriot Act , which does not overwhelmingly affect local law enforcement agencies like the NYPD.
- 15.
As noted, uniformed crime reports were first maintained in the 1960s.
- 16.
The practice of making false arrests and of planting fake evidence on suspects is called “flaking .”
- 17.
Some police officers were found to have used the phone book and information found on department databases to write “phantom ” summonses and tickets to individuals and vehicles. The summonses and tickets were actually never issued, but individuals only found out about them when the courts notified them that they had failed to pay a fine or show up in court.
- 18.
A police officer could “take care of” a traffic ticket by discreetly disposing of it or by providing false testimony in traffic court.
- 19.
The number of NYPD police officers arrested on an annual basis is less than 0.5% of the total complement of police officials, and this has remained stable since 1990. The overwhelming number of arrests is made for domestic incidents and alcohol-related offences such as bar altercations or drunk driving. The extreme (ab)use of excessive force, police corruption, and police criminality are exceptionally rare events and have tended to involve one or two police officers and not a large team of officers as seen during the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s.
- 20.
“Problem ” employees include police officers who were involved in higher-level disciplinary cases. As part of the punishment process, these officers would be transferred to undesirable work locations, and those who had performed in an exemplary fashion at those same police stations were permitted to transfer to a more desirable precinct.
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Albrecht, J.F. (2017). Timetable: Police Deviance and Serious Misconduct in the United States. In: Police Brutality, Misconduct, and Corruption . SpringerBriefs in Criminology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64438-7_3
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