Police Corruption

As Dutta (1999) notes, only a change in society and in societal expectations can bring change in institutions like a police department. The problem of police corruption is merely a representation of the problem of corruption in the culture at large. Dutta points out that police departments do not exist in a vacuum: nothing does. The culture of the country is really the starting place if one is going to address the issue of police brutality. Officers are impacted by victims of violence and by interactions with offenders on a daily basis. They are only humanand if they become brutal in their actions, it is a sad and unfortunate consequence of trafficking daily in an often brutal world. What is needed is not necessarily a crackdown on police departments, because to do so would be like putting a Band-Aid on a deeply infected wound. The wound is cultural and runs through all of society. Society has to address this cultural...

I agree with Dutta (1999) that it is probably often the case that officers exercise great restraint against aggressive and combative people when they justifiably could have used force. Yet, it is the few bad apples who receive all the attention because we have a media that loves to sensationalize and profit from such stories. This feeds into the negative culture of society and comes back to bear on police officers. Until society demands more accountability from the media and from itself, the problem is not going to go away. Everyone must set a higher moral and ethical standard for themselvesnot just police officers, but everyone in society because we are…