Enhancing Police Integrity PDF
Preview Enhancing Police Integrity
ENHANCING POLICE INTEGRITY Enhancing Police Integrity CARL B. KLOCKARS University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA SANJA KUTNJAK IVKOVIC´ Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA M. R. HABERFELD John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, NY, USA AC.I.P.CataloguerecordforthisbookisavailablefromtheLibraryofCongress. ISBN-100-387-36954-6(HB) ISBN-13978-0-387-36954-9(HB) ISBN-100-387-36956-2(e-book) ISBN-13978-0-387-36956-3(e-book) PublishedbySpringer, P.O.Box17,3300AADordrecht,TheNetherlands. www.springer.com Printedonacid-freepaper AllRightsReserved ©2006Springer Nopartofthisworkmaybereproduced,storedinaretrievalsystem,ortransmitted inanyformorbyanymeans,electronic,mechanical,photocopying,microfilming,recording orotherwise,withoutwrittenpermissionfromthePublisher,withtheexception ofanymaterialsuppliedspecificallyforthepurposeofbeingentered andexecutedonacomputersystem,forexclusiveusebythepurchaserofthework. In memory of Carl B. Klockars TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix PREFACE xi 1. THE IDEA OF POLICE INTEGRITY 1 2. MEASURING POLICE INTEGRITY 13 3. PROFILES OF INTEGRITY 39 4. THE CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA, POLICE DEPARTMENT 63 5. THE CHARLOTTE-MECKLENBURG, NORTH CAROLINA, POLICE DEPARTMENT 83 6. THE ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA, POLICE DEPARTMENT 111 7. THE SECOND SURVEY 137 8. RECRUITMENT, SELECTION, AND TRAINING 165 9. PROCESSING CITIZEN COMPLAINTS 183 10. METING OUT THE DISCIPLINE 201 11. CIRCUMSCRIBING THE CODE OF SILENCE 229 12. ENHANCING POLICE INTEGRITY 251 INDEX 271 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Wewouldliketothankmostsincerelythemanypoliceofficersandadministrators whogenerouslysharedtheirexperiences,opinions,andattitudesaboutthecomplex issuesofpoliceintegritywithusduringthe18monthsofourfieldwork.Thisbook certainlywouldnotcometofruitionwithouttheirhelp,support,andcandor.Thanks are especially due to the police officers who served patiently as members of our study groups. We are very grateful to the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) for providing substantial funding for the project (Grant Number 97-IJ-CX-0025). This book is based on the Final Report we submitted to the NIJ in 2001. WewouldliketotakethisopportunitytojoinCarl’sfamilyinexpressingdeepest regret that Carl passed away before the book was completed and went to the publisher. Although the manuscript was in its final stages at the time of Carl’s untimely death, we have missed the special, unique touch that Carl brought to the table. ix PREFACE A series of events in the 1990s drew public attention to police misconduct. The events ranged from the corruption investigation into the NYPD by the Mollen Commission,therevealingtestimonyofMarkFuhrmanintheO.J.Simpsontrial,to thequestionabledeathsatRubyRidgeandWaco.Andthen,therewastheRodney King incident. The 68-second excerpt from the videotape recording of the Rodney King beating on March 3, 1991 was broadcast around the world. This high-profile beating by the LAPD officers started the chain of events that included a state criminal trial, a federal criminal trial, and a civil trial, as well as the establishment of the Christopher Commission to conduct a comprehensive investigation into the excessiveuseofforcebytheLAPD,theresignationoftheformerLAPDPoliceChief DarrelGates,andtheriotsthatleft54peopledeadandmillionsofdollarsindamage. In a Gallup Poll conducted shortly after the Rodney King incident,1 more than two-thirds of the respondents in a nation-wide sample thought that incidents like this happened frequently across the country. Yet, this perception is quite contra- dictorytotheresultsofthe1999BureauofJusticenationwidesurveyofmorethan 80,000 respondents about police-citizen contacts.2 The BJS survey found that the respondents who had contact with the police reported that the police used force rarely, in less than 1 percent of all encounters and excessive force in only 0.76 percent of all the encounters. In a study measuring the level of confidence/trust in various professionals to do the right thing,3 policing was the profession that suffered from the largest drop in confidence between 1980 and 1995. Whereas in 1980 police officers were in the middle of the scale (ranking 5th of 12) and closely following pharmacists, clergy, firefighters, and teachers, in 1995 they were at the bottom of that scale (ranking 10th of 12), right before lawyers and politicians. Does this decline signal a crisis in public confidence in the police? The traditional emphasis on police misconduct—be it police corruption, use of excessiveforce,policetestilying,orsleepingonduty—andtheissuesofitscontrol (or the lack thereof) traditionally dominated the public and police administrators’ views. Such an approach was mostly individualistic, focusing on a few individual police officers—“rotten apples”—and their misconduct. Investigations conducted 1 GallupPollMonthly(1991).AmericansSayPoliceBrutalityFrequent,No.306:53–56. 2 Langan P. A., Greenfeld, L. A., Smith, S. K., Durose M. R., & D. J. Levin (2001). Contacts between Police and the Public: Findings from the 1999 National Survey. Retrieved on April 8,2006fromhttp://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/cpp99.pdf#search=‘police%20citizen%20contact% 20survey%20langan’. 3 SeeVicchio,S.J.(1997).EthicsandPoliceIntegrity:SomeDefinitionsandQuestionsforStudy.In Gaffigan, S.J., & McDonald, P.P. (Eds.). Police Integrity: Public Service with Honor. Washington, D.C.:U.S.DepartmentofJustice,p.13. xi xii Preface byvariousindependentcommissions4andsocial-sciencestudies5overatwo-decade periodfromtheearly1970stotheearly1990sshiftedthefocusfromtheindividual- isticapproachtotheorganizationalapproachbyincorporatingfactorsbothinternal and external to a police agency that potentially contribute to the extent and nature of police misconduct within the agency. However,tryingtomeasuretheextentofpolicemisconductisquitechallenging; participants in a corrupt transaction, police officers and citizens alike, have no reasonstoreportittothepoliceordescribetheirexperiencetotheresearchers.On the contrary, they have incentives not to do it. Witnesses at the scene may lack credibility(e.g.,peoplewithcriminalrecords)ormayadheretothecodeofsilence (e.g., fellow police officers) and thus be quite unlikely to come forward. Two prior projects experienced a range of challenges when attempting to ask policeofficersabouttheextentandnatureofpolicemisconduct.Fabrizio6 surveyed experiencedpoliceofficersattendingtheFBI’sNationalPoliceAcademyand,under the veil of confidentiality, asked them to describe incidents of police corruption in theiragencies.Noneoftherespondentsprovidedananswertothisquestion.Several otherstudiestackledthechallengeofmeasuringpolicecorruptionbyaskingpolice officers about the frequency of corruption in their agencies. These challenges are illustrated by the Department of Justice study of police behavior.7 The original grant to the Ohio Governor’s Office of Criminal Justice Services was expanded to include the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority and the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency. Because the Fraternal Order of Police in Pennsylvaniaputastrongpressureandencouragedpoliceofficersnottoparticipate, thestudywasdroppedinPennsylvaniabeforeitevenbegan.8Similarly,theFraternal Order of Police in Chicago decided not to endorse the Illinois project in Chicago, forcing the researchers in Illinois to exclude the Chicago Police Department— whichrepresentsapproximatelyone-quarterofthefull-timemunicipalpoliceforce in Illinois—from the project.9 4 See,e.g.,[KnappCommission]CommissiontoInvestigateAllegationsofPoliceCorruptionandthe City’s Anti-Corruption Procedures (1972). Knapp Commission Report on Police Corruption. New York:GeorgeBraziller;PennsylvaniaCrimeCommission(1974).ReportonPoliceCorruptionand theQualityofLawEnforcementinPhiladelphia.SaintDavids,PA:PennsylvaniaCrimeCommission; [ChristopherCommission]IndependentCommissionontheLosAngelesPoliceDepartment(1991). Report of the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department. Los Angeles: IndependentCommissionontheLosAngelesPoliceDepartment;[MollenCommission]NewYork CityCommissiontoInvestigateAllegationsofPoliceCorruptionandtheAnti-CorruptionProcedures ofthePoliceDepartment(1994).CommissionReport.NewYork:MollenCommission. 5 See,e.g.,Sherman,L.(1978).ScandalandReform.Berkeley,CA:UniversityofCaliforniaPress. 6 Fabrizio,L.E.(1990).TheFBINationalAcademy:AStudyoftheChangeinAttitudesofThoseWho Attend.Chicago,IL:OfficeofInternationalCriminalJustice,UniversityofChicago. 7 Martin, C. (1994). Illinois Municipal Officers’ Perceptions of Police Ethics. Chicago, IL: Illinois CriminalJusticeInformationAuthority,StatisticalAnalysisCenter. 8 Id. 9 Id. Preface xiii The events in the 1990s not only eroded the level of public confidence in the police, but also prompted the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) and the National Institute of Justice (NIJ)—the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice—to hold a national symposium to address this emerging problem. While struggling with the title of the COPS/NIJ conference, the organizers were debating whether to use the term “officer discretion,” “police accountability,” or “police integrity.” The traditional approach—to select the title that would either discuss police misconduct, ethics, or use of discretion— would center the discussion about various forms of misconduct and the ways of controlling or limiting it. A natural tendency would be to end up talking about events that signal the lack of integrity. As Hickman and colleagues put it, “[a]ll too often we infer integrity from its demonstrated absence. That is to say, research that focuses on corruption infers ideas about integrity absent its measurement.”10 At the end, the COPS/NIJ team decided to use the term police integrity as the guiding theme for the conference. Such a choice has far reaching consequences, as the organizers put it while discussing the significance of the event,11 The focus on “police integrity” opened a whole new domain. Although previous research, study, and experimentation had focused on critical issues such as corruption and excessive use of force, these approaches, had, in fact, revolved around single dimension. As a result, the solutions were constricted in that they were derived out of a need to control unwanted behaviors of individuals. In comparison, police integrity guided the focus on the broader domainofdevelopingahealthyorganizationthatwouldservetoreinforceandmaintainthe goodcharacterandconstructivemotivationsofmanyoftheindividualsjoiningtheranksof lawenforcement. Another advantage of using the term integrity over discretion or ethics is that integrity can be a feature of individuals, as well as small groups (e.g., patrol districts, shifts) or, for that matter, the entire police organizations. Conse- quently, we can discuss the level of police integrity of a particular police officer, within a specific patrol district, or within the whole police agency. Finally, compared to the problems associated with the empirical study of police misconduct directly,12 studying police integrity is prone to far fewer problems. In July of 1996, under the auspices of the National Institute of Justice and the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, some 200 police leaders, politicians, lawyers, and researchers attended a three-day National Symposium 10 Hickman,M.,Piquero,A.R.,&J.R.Greene(Eds.)(2004).PoliceIntegrityandEthics.Belmont, CA:Wadsworth/ThomsonLearning,p.1.1. 11 Greenberg, S. F. (1997). Executive Summary. In Gaffigan, S.J., & P.P. McDonald (Eds.). Police Integrity: PublicServicewithHonor. Washington,D.C.: U.S.DepartmentofJustice. Retrievedon April08,2006fromhttp://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles/163811.pdf,p.v. 12 See,e.g.,Fabrizio,supranote6;Knowles,J.J.(1996).TheOhioPoliceBehaviorStudy.Columbia, OH:OfficeofCriminalJusticeServices.
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