Police Corruption Analysis

In our society today, there have been several events, specifically within the last several years, where police corruption has been brought into question. Situations like Ferguson, Missouri have shown our country that we need to question how those in blue behave when handling different cases. In December of 2015, the streaming service Netflix released a ten-part documentary series entitled Making a Murderer. This series follows the story of Steven Avery, and what happened in his life after being jailed for eighteen years for a crime he was later found innocent of. The case took the public by storm, making people question whether police corruption was involved in his case. This documentary opens up an argument that is much broader than a single case: is corruption present across police departments in the United States, and, from
The first article I would like to address is by Sanja Ivković, To Serve and Collect: Measuring Police Corruption. Ivković discusses police brutality in this article from 2003. Her goal was to investigate to what extent police corruption occurs. First, she had to determine what could be considered corrupt behavior. By determining this, we can go on to figure out how to measure it, and then obtain accurate information about the corruption, such as the nature of it or to what extent it is being used. This allows us to use appropriate methods of control, to keep police corruption in check. We have no real way to measure police corruption as of late, so it is difficult to determine how often it occurs. Ivković described in her paper that even though police corruption is hard to measure, due to having no real measuring system and no people or officers willing to come forward frequently enough. The more people that come forward, the more reliability increases. Though we have no way of measuring corruption, there is enough that it causes concern in our justice