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Police Corruption


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             A scandal is perceived as a socially constructed experience that can lead to realignments in the structure of power within organizations. New York, for instance, has had more than a half dozen major scandals in its police department this century. It was the Knapp Commission in 1972 that first brought awareness to the NYPD when they released the results of a two-year investigation of alleged corruption. The findings were that bribery, especially among narcotics officers, was extremely high. As a result many officers were prosecuted and many more lost their jobs. A massive re-structuring took place afterwards with strict rules and policy to make sure that the problem would never happen again. .
             However, in May 1992 Michael Dowd and four other New York officers and one former officer were arrested for drug trafficking by police in Long Island. When the arrests hit the papers, it was forehead-slapping time among police brass. Not only had some of their cops become robbers, but also the crimes had to be uncovered by a suburban police force, which proved to be very embracing to the City of New York. Politicians and the media started asking what had happened to the system for rooting out bad cops established 21 years ago at the urging of the Knapp Commission, the investigator body that heard Officer Frank Serpico and other police describe a citywide network of corrupted cops (James 8).
             To find out, at the time, New York City mayor David Dinkins established the Mollen Commission, named for its chairman, Milton Mollen, a former New York judge. In the same Manhattan hearing room where the Knapp Commission once sat, the new commission heard Dowd and other officers add another shocking chapter to the old story of police corruption. And with many American cities wary that drug money will turn their departments bad, police departments around the country were lending an uneasy ear to the stories of officers sharing lines of cocaine from the dashboard of their squad cars and climbing down fire escapes with sacks full of cash stolen from dealers' apartments (Weber 5).


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