Mollen Commission, Police Corruption & Michael Dowd

Police corruption is a complex issue. Police corruption or the abuse of authority by a police officer, acting officially to fulfill personal needs or wants, is a growing problem in the United States today. Things such as an Internal Affairs department, a strong leadership organization, and community support are just a few considerations in the prevention of police corruption. An examination of a local newspaper or any police-related publication in an urban city during any given week would most likely have an article about a police officer that got caught committing some kind of corrupt act. Police corruption has increased dramatically with the illegal cocaine trade, with officers acting alone or in-groups to steal money from dealers or distribute cocaine themselves. Large groups of corrupt police have been caught in New York, New Orleans, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, as well as many other cities. Corruption within police departments falls into 2 basic categories, external corruption and internal corruption. In this research project, I will concentrate on external corruption. Recently, external corruption has been given the larger center of attention. I have decided to include the fairly recent accounts of corruption from a few major cities, mainly New York, because that is where I have lived in the past year.

For a corrupt act to occur, three distinct elements of police corruption must be present simultaneously: 1) mishandling of authority, 2) mishandling of official capacity, and 3) mishandling of personal attainment (Dantzker, p 157). It can be said that power, inevitably tends to corrupt. It is yet to be recognized that while there is no reason to suppose that policemen as individuals are any less fallible than other members of society, people are often shocked and outraged when policemen are exposed violating the law. The reason is simple; their deviance elicits a special feeling of betrayal. "Most studies support the view that corruption is endemic, if not universal, in police departments. The danger of corruption for police, is that it may invert the formal goals of the organization and may lead to the use of organizational power to encourage and create crime rather than to deter it" (Sherman, p 31). Police corruption falls into two major categories-- external corruption, which concerns police contacts with the public; and internal corruption, which involves the relationships among policemen within the works of the police department.

One of the more recent events to shake New York City and bring attention to the national problem of police corruption was brought up beginning in 1992, when five officers were arrested on drug-trafficking charges. Michael Dowd, the suspected 'ring leader', was the kind of cop who gave new meaning to the word moonlighting. It wasn't just any job that the 10-year veteran of the New York City force was working on the side. Dowd was a drug dealer. From scoring free pizza as a rookie, he graduated to pocketing cash seized in drug raids, and from there simply to robbing dealers outright, ...