The slippery slope concept and police corruption through gratuities

Corruption Issues in Modern Policing

The Slippery Slope Concept:

The slippery slope concept is a metaphor commonly used to illustrate the potential ethical problems that can arise in connection with specific acts or policies that may be inconsequential but which are capable of triggering much more serious problems different in degree but very similar in kind. With regard to police corruption in particular, the slippery slope applies to any deliberate minor violation of law or policy, such as the acceptance of nominal gratuities (Schmalleger, 2008).

In principle, the danger represented by the slippery slope is that even nominal gratuities intended without any manipulative purpose or to encourage preferential treatment may lead naturally to more substantial gratuities as well as those specifically proffered for the purpose of generating a reciprocal obligation on the part of the police officer. For example, a local restaurant owner who provides a discount to police officers may not necessarily be doing so to gain preferential treatment. Likewise, gratuities of purely nominal value (such as free coffee with a paid meal) are too inconsequential to pose an ethical problem in and of themselves.

However, even small gratuities can precipitate ethical problems such as where the restaurant owner who has been furnishing minor gratuities requests special consideration in the realm of the enforcement duties of the officers involved. He may request that a marked patrol unit "just keep an eye on the place around closing time" or that daytime patrols "take it easy on my customers who have to double park for a minute." Where officers who show up at closing time to provide extra security or make allowances for double parked customers begin receiving their meals for free, they have descended further down the slope and increased their risk of slipping down even further.

Generally, the initiation of any form of quid pro quo arrangement (whether by design or simply through natural progression) is extremely dangerous to the integrity of law enforcement personnel precisely because there is often no bright line distinguishing appropriate and inappropriate relationships. Ironically, the transfer of gratuities may change the character of certain occurrences where no problem would have existed otherwise. In the previous example, there would not necessarily be any ethical problem with a restaurant owner asking patrol officers to pass by his business at closing time, especially when it is within their geographic area of authority. However, the same request in conjunction with any gratuity creates an inference that the two are related and therefore raises slippery slope concerns.

Public Corruption Theories:

Society at Large Hypothesis

Wilson's society at large hypothesis suggests that corruption in policing is merely a function of social attitudes and more general inclinations toward corruption in society at large (Delattre, 2006). More specifically, the more deviating from official policies, rules, and laws is an accepted part of society, the more any entities within that society (including law enforcement authorities) will reflect that overall approach to laws in general. Therefore, in societies where preferential treatment for recognizable celebrities or powerful or wealthy individuals is the norm, the more police personnel will extend similar preferential treatment to those individuals. That is because police personnel often come from the communities in which they work and by the time they enter the profession, they tend to have absorbed predominant cultural norms and values (Delattre, 2006).

Rotten Apple Hypothesis

The rotten apple hypothesis suggests very simply that certain individuals in society are more inclined than others toward unethical and illegal conduct and that a small percentage of them manage to slip through hiring processes designed to weed out individuals of questionable moral character from policing (Delattre, 2006). In the simplest version of this hypothesis, rotten apples are responsible for individual acts of impropriety and corruption but do not necessarily influence the conduct of fellow officers. In the more complex and insidious form of this hypothesis, rotten apples "spoil the bunch" by influencing the behavior of other officers in a manner similar to that responsible for both the society at large and the structural/affiliation hypotheses of police corruption.