Hi everyone and welcome to the last lecture. We have one more sort of concluding lecture to come. That one just has a bonus mark attached to it.
So this is our official last lecture. You guys have done it, you're here. The last thing we want to talk about is police corruption.
Now before we kind of start talking about police corruption... What we have to do is first try to define what police corruption is, then take a look at some of the causes of police corruption, and end the lecture by talking about some solutions to police corruption. One way to define police corruption is to categorize it, is to define it based on a series of categories.
Now, these categories can vary. They can go from anywhere from, you know, corruption of authority. you know, doing something, for example, maybe kind of demanding a free coffee at the abortion, something like that, to getting kickbacks, to getting bribes, to maybe setting people up, to maybe kind of falsifying information, planting evidence.
One can imagine that we can go about sort of building these categories, you know, maybe seven, eight, nine, ten categories. We can even organize them, you know, from the sort of least impactful in society, maybe something like, you know, getting a free coffee, to the most impactful in society, for example, you know, abusing your discretion or planting evidence or falsifying information, things like that, protecting criminals, things like that. And one could imagine that sort of this is a learned behavior, right?
That you could move from a sort of... the least of these types of corruption. This is something that you'll see sort of in the documentary as well. From least forms of corruption to the most serious forms. This is what we call sort of crime as a career model.
In other words, we say that as a criminal, as someone who's committing a particular criminal activity, you're not likely to kind of start off at the very top of the crime ladder, right? No one kind of, how many people go from Not committing any crime to becoming an assassin overnight, right? You kind of start off with small crimes and you work your way up.
Just like in your career, you learn and you learn and you learn and you work your way up. And what is it you learn? Well, maybe you learn some skills of how to do it. How do you steal money? How do you plant evidence?
How do you get a bribe? Maybe part of it is sort of learning the culture, learning the subculture. culture kind of realizing that your uh colleagues are not going to disagree with you or your colleagues are not going to rat you out or you know you're all in it together so gaining those sort of cultural capitals we've spoken about before however any form of definition of police of police corruption is either too encompassing so it includes things that we can all agree is not really police corruption, or at least they're not so seriously put in the same category.
For example, getting a free coffee at Tim Horton is qualitatively a different type of police corruption than, for example, planting evidence. So is it really helpful to call all of them police corruption? Well, maybe not.
You see, in an academic sense, usually we say something that explains everything explains nothing. What do I mean by that? I mean, a definition that includes everything.
It's not very useful to us as academics because it doesn't help us kind of parse out the details, parse out their sort of their unique aspect of a situation we're interested in. And usually as academics, we're interested in the details, you know, the devil's in the details. So it can either be too broad.
and too encompassing or maybe it's not it doesn't include everything in there for example these type of definitions of police corruption oftentimes don't include definition don't include actions that have a noble cause this is what we call noble cause corruption or dirty hairy problems these are activities that are for the gain of not the individual but the individual believes that this is what they should do in order to do their job properly. In other words, it crops the means of policing, but not the ends of it. This is such things as, for example, you know, beating up a suspect to get a confession, or planting an evidence on someone that you know is guilty, but you're having a hard time catching them.
So therefore, any definition of corruption must pay attention both to the means of policing and the ends. Yet, there are certain activities that corrupt the end of policing, for example, you know, falsifying evidence. to get someone off the hook, or protecting drug dealers, or tipping them off, or getting bribes in order not to arrest them.
These are the things that sort of jeopardize the very ends of policing, the very sort of foundation of why police exist. But corruption can also include means of police, right? Things that you do in order to further the cause of policing, but they're illegal things to do. So maybe instead of defining police as a series, police corruption as a series of categories of activities, and it's not very useful to us, maybe another way to do it would be to sort of make a definition of it that would include these issues. One of the best definitions of police corruption is that I've read.
is by Kellogg in sort of 1997 work that he argues police officers act corruptly when in the exercise or failing to exercise their authority in order in other words even they do something or fail to do so they act with the primary intention of furthering private or departmental advantages i'll say it again police officers act corruptly when in exercising of failing to exercise their authority, they act with the primary intention of furthering private or departmental gains. Let's break that down. What do we mean?
There are two important things here. One, the definition includes both means and ends of policing. So it's either for personal gain or departmental advantage, furthering, you know, increasing arrest reports, catching the criminals in the community, things like that. The other important part of the definition I want you to pay attention to is the word intention. You see, it brings in the notion of what was the intention of the activity done by the police.
Because police does many menial jobs, and police has to get its hands dirty, I thought, in order to do them. It has been part of our definition of policing all year long. I don't want to beat the dead horse here. You know what I mean? go back to sort of let me define what police does in police in uniform kind of talked about how police does many things that this is true let me talk about sort of history of policing as well that if we're not able to define exactly what they are this is this comes back to the very first definition of policing right it's hard to define what police actually does therefore maybe it is the intention of the police officer that's important when they commit a particular act and we see this in sort of the legal system that we have in Canada.
The legal system demands that a police officer must be able to justify action in a reasonable way. In other words, they must be able to communicate that action. In other words, if a police officer says, I pulled that guy over because he looked shady, the police officer needs to be able to communicate to people in the courtroom.
to a group of reasonable people that's where jury is right group of reasonable people to a group of reasonable people whether or not their intention for stopping the person was a legitimate intention or not otherwise the police can't just say you know i felt threatened or police can't just say you know i felt like the person looked shady you have to be able to explain why you felt that in other words even our court system demands of the police to explain the intention behind their action. A good example to sort of make sense of this definition is the difference between bribes and gratuities. Gratuities and bribes are one and the same thing, but they're different, aren't they? Gratuity is given as a form of saying, thank you very much.
It was given anyways, if you did something or not. It doesn't really have the intention behind it to mold your behavior. The intention is just to show appreciation.
The outcome of your action is not important. It is appreciation for your action. These gratuities are given out to police all the time. Police gets a free coffee at Tim Hortons, a free burger at McDonald's. Maybe people let them in front of them at a lineup in, you know, a grocery store.
Happens all the time. Happens to us too, as non-police. A student gets a professor a box of chocolate.
You know, you get your boss a, you know, a bottle of whiskey. Things like that. Rise and bribes are different, aren't they? Bribes are given as a way of encouraging you to do something or not do something. In other words, bribes are given in order to change your behavior.
See, if you get your prof a box of chocolate and the prof says thank you, the intention is to say thanks to the prof for being a good prof all year long, and the prof says thank you very much, I enjoyed this chocolate, that might be okay. But if the prof is accepting the... box of chocolate and in return it's going to increase your grade. That's a bribe.
And this is what we mean by intentions. You see, the outdoors should say that gratuities are not necessarily a good thing either. The intention doesn't matter. It is the action that the police should not be accepting a free burger at McDonald's. A free coffee at Tim Horton.
Because they say it's a slippery slope. Maybe the police gets used to it. We'll start expecting it.
Then when it is not offered, they get mad. They don't do their actions. On the other hand, people say, well, maybe it's a way to build communities. You know, giving a free coffee to a police officer may be a way of saying, hey, thanks a lot.
We appreciate you in our community. Maybe it's a way of building relationships. Getting that police officer to come by. Now they meet everyone in the lineup who's in the community.
The definition that we forwarded kind of helps us make sense of this. In other words, it doesn't, the action itself becomes less important, right, and the intention behind the action becomes important. Is the police officer showing up to that important sooner next time they have a call because they get free coffee then? Or is it that they get free coffee because they've always been a good police officer, have always responded promptly?
And this is just a way of saying thank you. I'll leave that up to you to decide. I don't know what the answer is.
But a bit of chief of police comes out and says, I'm against police corruption. They have to sue the side. What exactly do they mean by police corruption?
Now. So in short, so far we have defined police corruption as an activity that has an intention behind it to further either private or departmental gain in a legitimate way. Okay, maybe we can live with that definition. Seems to be good enough. The next question that we have to ask ourselves is, what are the causes of police corruption?
Well, in the news, in sort of the water cooler conversations around, there seems to be this suggestion that we have this bad apple problem in police. And there are a few bad apples that give a bad name to the rest of the police. This definition is not very useful for us.
This kind of explanation is not very useful for us on a number of levels. One, it doesn't make sense when we look at it statistically. Police corruption exists in all levels of policing. It occurs all across the board. And it seems systematic.
In other words, we see the same action over and over and over again. Accepting bribes, stealing on the job. Abuse of those who are not able to advocate for themselves. Excessive use of power.
Those type of things. We see them in all different forms of policing, amongst all levels of policing. So it cannot just be a bad apple problem.
It cannot just be a few bad apples problem. Furthermore, the few bad apples argument dismisses the notion. Imagine if Air Canada said, listen, yeah, yeah, yeah. Once in a while, we have a pilot that crashes their plane into a mount. But we just had a few bad Apple pilot problems.
Most of our pilots are not crashing their planes into mountains. You wouldn't fly Air Canada. For Air Canada, it's only a small percentage of our pilots who get drunk behind the wheel of the plane. The rest of them are fine.
It's only about, you know, 12, 15, 20% of them. You wouldn't get it. So few bad apple problems when you have a gun, when you have the ability to arrest someone and take away their freedom. Mistakes are that. Few bad apples is a problem.
Another problem is that it doesn't take into account that if you have corruption at the higher level, it corrupts the rest of it. It corrupts the rest of society. It corrupts the rest of the police.
It corrupts the rest of the organization. So it's not really true that, oh, it's just a few bad apple problem, as if that dismisses the problem altogether. That's not the case. We are having an institutional, when people in a community come up against the police, it's not against individual police officers, it's against institution of police, right? So we have to take a look at some of the causes of corruption within this larger institution of.
police. We can divide causes into two factors. There are some constant factors that are important. Discretion is number one, isn't it?
Discretion is one of the number one reasons that leads to police corruption. It's not the argument of let's get rid of discretion, is it? We heard this argument kind of when we were talking to Chick Larkin too.
It's not about getting rid of discretion altogether. No, no, no, no. It's about something more than that. It's about the question of what we should do with police discretion.
Because you see, a police officer who's able to decide whom to charge and who not to charge, a police officer that can decide on whom to exercise their power and on whom to exercise their power, whom they do not exercise it by definition will be able to abuse that power take that into consideration some an argument against discretion says pointing out that it is police discretion take out their gun or not take out the car how to define a particular situation that can make discretionary good thing or a bad Low visibility of police, both public and managerial. Low managerial visibility means that oftentimes the chiefs of police and the surgeons don't have a direct view of what the police is doing. They often can't see what the individual officers are up to on a daily basis, on an hourly basis, on a minute-to-minute basis. Most of you who work in jobs that, you know, if you work in a fast food job or in an office or something, your manager is there to look.
at you all the time but those of you who do work jobs like your manager is around you know maybe you work for the city kind of drive around a truck uh pick up garbage you know clean up the portions like that plant the stuff you know what i mean it's much easier to get away with not doing work when you don't have that visibility police also has very low public visibility oftentimes on places doing policing they corner off the area they don't let us close by to see what's going on You can't really see what police is up to. You don't have really easy access to police's body cams or their notes. You have to sort of take police at their words. It kind of reduces the availability of eyes on police, availability of sort of public scrutiny on police.
This goes hand in hand and it gets exasperated by the... sort of blue code of silence, blue wall of silence that exists in policing. that prevents police officers from blowing the whistle on corruption in police. Sort of in our interview today, for example, for this lecture, we talk about what happens when police becomes whistleblowers, what happens to whistleblowers in police. Sort of when we talk about police as an organized group, that looks an awful lot like a gang.
The secrecy becomes an important part of that definition. But if you know, you don't rat on anyone. We know for a fact that, for example, police officers who work in internal affairs, those who police the police, always look down upon by the rest of the police.
Doesn't that say something about an organization that looks down upon those who are there to police it? Last but not least. association of police with criminals creates a fertile ground for this kind of activity. There are also sort of variable factors, factors that are specific to groups of police. For example, we see more police corruption amongst police officers who work in communities that are unorganized.
There is a lot of sort of enemy in these communities, these disorganized communities, communities that can't advocate for themselves, that can't look over the police, that can't sort of keep police accountable for their actions. We see much more corruption in those police, in those communities, poor communities, communities that have a large amount of recent immigrants, large amount of people with not only lack of sort of monetary capital, also social and cultural capital. What we're doing talks about here. We've talked about social and cultural capital before.
We see a lot of corruption in police that deals with vice crimes, victimless crimes, you know prostitution, drug dealing, things like that. Number one, there's a lot of money involved. Number two, there are no victims.
It's much easier for police to be corrupt because there's no one making a complaint. Okay, so if We define police corruption as a form of, as an intentional activity or lack of activity. And if we see causes of police corruption as being sort of police abusing the discretionary power that they are given, the secrecy that exists in policing, then how can we deal with police corruption?
There can be some practical aspects, right? We can pass anti-corruption laws. We can put anti-corruption policies into place.
We can make being a corrupt police officer much easier to sort of fire a corrupt police officer. Right now, it's extremely difficult to fire a corrupt police officer. It's extremely difficult to fire a police officer who has abusive power, mostly because they are protected.
by the police unions. Police holds us hostage as society. If we don't allow the police to get what they want in the negotiation with their unions, if we don't let the police get the qualified immunity that they want, if we don't let the police get sort of the ability to have to get paid for years while they're off duty because of a heinous act that they've committed, police will go on strike. Police will not respond to calls.
We need police to protect us. So at one point, police hold society hostage in order to push these demands. Okay?
So we have to be very cautious about that politically. That's why it takes political motivation for us to turn around to a police unit and say, no, no, no, you work for us. Yes.
I'm not against police unions by any means. I'm very pro-unions in that. However, no union, public servants, should keep the rest of society hostage.
They shall not demand unreasonable demand. And police unions in our country are demanding that. The reason why we can't fire a corrupt police officer...
The reason why a police officer who beats up and kills a suspect continues to get paid years after. while they're off duty, when they go on paid leave. Imagine if you found out that a teacher who had abused a child was on paid leave for 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 years before the case was resolved. You would be mad. We should be mad at police for that too.
We should demand political change there too. Sure. Okay. Put body cameras on, please. bad idea either.
I mean at the same time all these activities for body cameras on them you know sure why not. For example let's take a look at sort of you know independent investigation units that show up when police does when there's a police shooting there's an independent civilian investigation unit mostly formed by ex-police officers people connected to the police. But why should that be the case? Shouldn't none police police the police? Does it make sense to bring retired police officers to look after whether police did the right thing or not?
Isn't there a conflict of interest? Or are we bringing people from the same subculture? Why should chiefs of police be picked amongst police officers?
It's an administrative job. It doesn't require you to be a police officer. Why can't you hire? non-police officers as chiefs, inserting some new blood at the top.
Because if you keep insisting that we need to promote people from the bottom to the top, by the time that consul becomes a chief of police, they've been indoctrinated in the same culture that you're demanding for them to change. Maybe a better idea is inserting some new blood, people from outside of this circle, but we insert them not at the bottom by hiring, you know, female police officers. ethnic minority police officers at the bottom of the ladder, we're hiring them on the top of the ladder.
As chiefs, as policy employees. Sure these external controls are amazing, I like them. But then again, I want to hire a police officer I trust. I want to have a police officer I don't have to put a body camera on.
That's the police officer I want. So maybe another massive aspect of reducing police corruption is talk about police ethics, talk about police responsibility, talk about police as a profession. Hiring ethical police officers.
I get about a dozen calls a year about, you know, people who want to become police officers and they put me down as a reference. And whenever they call me, they say, okay, we have about 50, 60 questions. They're kind of multiple choice questions.
You know, like, does this person do X, Y, and Z? But very likely. You're not likely at all, you know, five or six or seven.
I always say, I don't want to answer these questions. Let's talk. And that's how, you know, usually we get our conversation going. I say, I know what you're really trying to ask. You want to know if this person is an ethical person.
This is a good person. If when left to their own devices, they choose the ethical way, even if it's the hard way. Or does this person call corners?
They want to know if the person that's getting hired, are they compassionate? Are they good, decent human beings? Are they nice? Yeah.
So maybe it's about ethics in policing. Maybe in police training, instead of having, you know, 15, 20 minutes, 30 minutes of those two, three months, four months of their devoted training, devoted to... training of ethics, maybe we should teach our police officers, maybe we should get our police officers to take a course in ethics.
Maybe having police educated police officers who come to social science programs like this is useful because they have learned about ethics. They have learned about what is right and wrong and why it's important to do the right thing even if no one is watching. Why do you think we take plagiarism in this university so seriously? Why do you think the moment you plagiarize you will get the book thrown at you?
Because we want to raise ethical people, ethical students, right? So maybe one of the best ways to reduce police corruption is in hiring practices. Another way to do it is to encourage sort of a sense of professionalism in police.
The idea that you as a police officer are responsible, you have a professional duty, you have a professional dignity, that you should not break this movement, that you should not... break that dignity. That no matter how much gain you can get from some momentary act of corruption, If that breaks your sense of being a good police officer, that's not the way to do it. Maybe.
I'm teaching that professionalism. And we do that in Canada. For example, when a police officer dies, especially in the course of duty, you have massive parades of police officers coming in from all over North America, maybe all over the world, to attend their funeral. I've attended it.
I lived in a city in which a police officer died in the line of duty, and her funeral was attended by... police officers from across the globe, Australia, England, France, United States, Mexico, you know anywhere from British Columbia to Newfoundland, police officers showed up in their uniforms to line the streets as her coffin went by in the city, people in the city came out. This is to point out that we teach you as a serious professional, there is a pride to this professional and if we teach this pride to people, or police officers maybe they become less well that's about it for this lecture as i said there is one more sort of conclusionary lecture that it's uh coming up once you finish this one watch it it's about 10 15 minutes long and there is a bonus mark associated with it all right see you guys soon bye