Question

write about police corruption and injustice in the system

Answer 1

Police corruption is an international problem. Historically, police misconduct has been a factor in the development of police institutions worldwide, but it is a particular problem in counterinsurgency and peacekeeping operations, such as the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization police training program in Afghanistan. There, police abuse and corruption appear endemic and have caused some Afghans to seek the assistance of the Taliban against their own government

. • The most reliable and extensive knowledge about police corruption in the world’s Englishspeaking countries is found in the reports of specially appointed blue-ribbon commissions, independent of government, created for the sole purpose of conducting investigations of police corruption.

• To reduce police corruption, the commissions recommend creating external oversight over the police with a special focus on integrity, improving recruitment and training, leadership from supervisors of all ranks about integrity, holding all commanders responsible for the misbehavior of subordinates, and changing the organization’s culture to tolerate misbehavior less.

• The remedies proposed by the commissions, however, rely on a set of contextual conditions not commonly found in countries emerging from conflict or facing serious threats to their security.

• Triage involves targeting assistance in countries where there are solid prospects for tipping police practice in the desired direction. Bootstraps involves using reform within the police itself as a lever to encourage systemic social and political reform in countries in crisis or emerging from conflict.

Corruption, generally defined as abuse of authority for private gain, is among the world’s oldest practices and a fundamental cause of intrastate conflict, providing a focal point for many social groups’ grievances against governments. It can be equally crucial after conflict, when fledgling law enforcement institutions cannot control official abuse. Whenever the international community has tried to build a secure, viable society after a conflict, it has faced the need to reform the institution most responsible for law enforcement—the local police force—to reduce its predatory and often pervasive corruption. Transparency International reported that police in eighty-six countries were judged the fourth most corrupt public institution after political parties, public officials generally, and parliaments and legislature. Corruption was worst in sub-Saharan Africa, the newly independent states of the former Soviet bloc,the Middle East, and North Africa. According to a recent Human Rights Watch report, Nigerian police officers regularly commit crimes against the citizens they are mandated to protect. Nigerians attempting to make ends meet are accosted on a daily basis by armed police officers who demand bribes, threatening those who refuse with arrest or physical harm. Meanwhile, high-level police officers embezzle public funds meant to pay for police operations. The report concludes that in Nigeria, the police have become “a symbol of unfettered corruption, mismanagement, and abuse. In a survey confined to India in 2005, Transparency International found that police ranked highest among nine public services on its corruption index. Police corruption is severely regressive, with people in the lowest quintile of income reporting most frequently that they had paid bribes to police. The World Bank has reported that in twenty-three countries studied, people saw the police not “as a source of help and security, but rather of harm, risk, and impoverishment.”