Police Corruption Is Structural

by Will Wilkinson on April 15, 2008

Peter Moskos explains, in this 4 minute clip, how the structure of police compensation rigs the game against young, poor black men:

The relationship between the war on drugs, police incentives, and the deprivation of liberty and self-reinforcing destruction of opportunity for a whole class of Americans may well constitute the most egregious injustice in the structure of American institutions.

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    I can't play the video now so forgive me if this is discussed but there was a NY Times article a while back about the seriously terrible pay given to police officers in NY City during their (fairly long) training period, one that even officers from other cities with several years of experience must go through. The pay is something like 22K/year, with a lot of expenses- buying uniforms, a safe for one's gun, etc. I guess people might think this is a sort of hazing mechanism to weed out people who don't really want to do the job (though why that's good isn't clear to me) but I strongly suspect it provides great opportunities to get involved in corruption early on to make ends meet, a habit that's then very hard to shake. Not every city has such a crazy program but I don't know how widely this problem exists.
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    Matt, Moskos is clear that there is actually very little petty corruption ... shakedowns, cops on the take, that sort of thing. The clip is about how cops have a strong above the board incentive to make overtime pay for court appearances by collaring petty drug dealers. (They get two hours over time no matter what, and usually the guy arrested is in and out of court in just a few minutes -- adding to his record and likelihood of longer santences later.) My point was that the corruption is in the structure of legit incentives to ruin young black men's lives, not in the character of cops.
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    That may be so in some places. I come from a family of cops, though, and have spent a lot of time around them. They pretty much uniformly complain about going to court, though, and try to avoid it if they can. Overtime isn't hard to get in lots of other ways, ones people often fine more interesting, so I'm somewhat less sure how often this is a huge incentive. (Plus, if you work days this may not be over-time anyway.) I'm sure it varies from place to place, but I'm slightly skeptical that this is a huge incentive. (Of course even if it's a small one the harm far, far outweighs any gain.) Cops can find plenty of other reasons to arrest small-time drug dealers if they want (many cops just really don't like such people) and I suspect that most see the court appearance as a draw-back more than anything, especially since most cops can get as much over-time as they want in other ways.

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