General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: My wife wasn't fond of cops before this past year now she has no respect for them. [View all]JonLP24
(29,322 posts)Mollen Commission - NYPD 1994.
New Orleans police department -- the most corrupt & incompetent police department
What do both have in common? Both departments feature police unlikely to rat on their own.
few bad apples -- the biggest problem is more than just a few a bad apples.
Understanding the Psychology of Police Misconduct
Most law enforcement professionals are, at their core, good, ethical, and caring people. Despite the overuse of a popular cliché, many officers do in fact enter law enforcement because they want to make a positive difference in their communities. Officers frequently espouse strong, positive moral values while working diligentlyin many cases, at great personal riskto bring dangerous criminals to justice. Doing so provides officers with a strong sense of personal satisfaction and self-worth. As a result, most officers do notand in many cases cannotengage in unethical conduct unless they can somehow justify to themselves the morality of their actions.3
Decades of empirical research have supported the idea that whenever a persons behaviors are inconsistent with their attitudes or beliefs, the individual will experience a state of psychological tensiona phenomenon referred to as cognitive dissonance. 4 Because this tension is uncomfortable, people will modify any contradictory beliefs or behaviors in ways intended to reduce or eliminate discomfort. Officers can reduce psychological tension by changing one or more of their cognitionsthat is, by modifying how they think about their actions and the consequences of those behaviorsor by adjusting their activities, attitudes, or beliefs in ways that are consistent with their values and self-image. Generally speaking, an officer will modify the cognition that is least resistant to change, which, in most cases, tends to be the officers attitudes, not behaviors.
One of the simplest ways that officers can reduce the psychological discomfort that accompanies misconduct is to cognitively restructure unethical behaviors in ways that make them seem personally and socially acceptable, thereby allowing officers to behave immorally while preserving their self-image as ethically good people. The following is a partial list of common rationalizations that officers can use to neutralize or excuse unethical conduct:
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Victim of circumstance. Officers who utilize this method convince themselves that they behaved improperly only because they had no other choice. Officers may claim that they were the victims of peer pressure, an unethical supervisor, or an environment where everyone else is doing it, so what else could they possibly have done? Regardless of the context, these officers excuse their conduct by alleging that they had no alternative but to act unethically.
http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm?fuseaction=display_arch&article_id=2290&issue_id=12011
The article explains how the situation can both snowball. The search function the link above and the words "noble cause corruption" would give fair well researched articles that detail a good understanding of the most common police misconduct problem -- unconstitutional policing.