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Police Corruption

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Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice

Overview

Police corruption is a form of police misconduct or police deviance typically defined through the motivation to achieve personal gain. Police corruption includes many heterogeneous forms of behavior that could be classified on the basis of several criteria, including the motivation for corruption (i.e., economic corruption v. noble-cause corruption), regularity of payments (i.e., pads v. scores), consequences (i.e., distortive v. non-distortive corruption), and the level of aggressiveness (i.e., grass-eaters v. meat-eaters). Barker and Roebuck developed a typology of police corruption which recognizes corruption of authority, kickbacks, opportunistic theft, shakedowns, protection of illegal activities, the fix, direct criminal activities, and internal payoffs. Punch added flaking (i.e., planting of evidence) or padding (i.e., supplementing of evidence) as the ninth type of corruption.

Theories explaining the causes of police corruption could be classified into four larger...

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Recommended Reading and References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Criminal Justice, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Sanja Kutnjak Ivković

Authors
  1. Sanja Kutnjak Ivković
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Correspondence to Sanja Kutnjak Ivković .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR), Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Gerben Bruinsma

  2. VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Gerben Bruinsma

  3. Department of Criminology, Law and Society, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    David Weisburd

  4. Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel

    David Weisburd

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Ivković, S.K. (2014). Police Corruption. In: Bruinsma, G., Weisburd, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5690-2_362

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5690-2_362

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-5689-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-5690-2

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