Police corruption has become a very difficult and touchy topic to handle. Not only is it detrimental to the department, but it is something we can’t have in our community. Unfortunately it has become more and more common amongst the police departments in the United States. It has led to very bad cases such as crash in California and even the New Jersey state police lords of discipline. Police corruption can be easily solved, and it is very important to have programs like Internal Affairs to keep the officers in line.

A lot of people feel that with the structure of our system and so many loopholes everywhere else that it may be easy for a cop to be corrupt. The biggest reason that police corruption occurs is because the officers abuse their given authority because they feel they have the power to do what they want when they want. Another reason police corruption happens is because they hit a bust on drugs and a cop likes the drugs so they take a little bit and don’t tell anyone. This not only is wrong for an officer, but for anyone to do and it gives the criminal less of a charge because they weren’t sentenced with as much stuff as they really had when busted. Police corruption falls into two different categories internal corruption and external corruption. Internal meaning it involves the people that work within the department, and external involves police contacts within the public.
There are 3 things that must happen at the same time for a cop to be considered being corrupt. First the officer has to be mishandling their authority. Second they must be mishandling of an official capacity. And third, a mishandling of personal attainment. An example would be an officer taking money from a criminal in return to keep them out of jail. This is a violation of all 3 stated above. A cop may even lie to keep a person out of jail because they know the person or