Behind the Badge: Unmasking and Preventing Police Corruption

Title: Behind the Badge: Unmasking and Preventing Police Corruption
Original Publication Date: 11/8/2023
Transcript URL: share.descript.com/view/3mw7dv9a5a8
Description: In this episode, we delve into a crucial topic: Police Corruption and the challenges officers face daily. We'll also discuss effective measures to prevent such corruption in law enforcement. This episode features 20 year police captain and police fiction author Frank Scalise. frankzafiro.com
#PoliceCorruption #LawEnforcement #CommunityPolicing #PreventCorruption #PoliceAccountability
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Begin Transcript:
[00:00:00] Welcome to Organized Crime and Punishment, the best spot in town to hang out and talk about history and crime, with your hosts, Steve and Mustache Chris.
I started to think about another form of, I guess it could be corruption, and it comes out of the fact that policing, like just about anything else, Is a lot more subjective than it is the objective and, uh, and baseball. Now they have it where they have the AI calling balls and strikes and. Seriously, it's experimental and, uh, and then they'll go to it.
Uh, if, uh, they can, that you can challenge [00:01:00] it. But there's a lot of subjectivity to a ball and a strike. Now you could have it where you see somebody who maybe rolls through a stop and, uh, should I give them a ticket? Did I really see it the right way? But you could also see it where somebody blows past a stops, uh, stop red light past the school bus.
But it's 10 minutes before your shift is supposed to end and you really don't feel like staying over. And I got to get my kid to this and that, and, uh, I'm not going to, that's got kind of a corruption in a way. Well, policing requires a great deal of discretion. That's no question. And I think if you're going to examine but.
Apples to apples is a better way to look at it, right? So if you're talking about somebody rolling through a stop, are you working that intersection? Are you writing tickets? You stop. I stopped Chris. I don't know him. He gets a [00:02:00] ticket. I stopped Steve. We went to high school together. In fact, we play baseball together.
Uh, you know, I'm going to give you a warning this time. Is that correct? You know, I was not a traffic count. I, I gave a lot of warnings and my, my rule of thumb essentially was, is if I stopped you and we had a short conversation and I thought that our conversation had a likelihood of affecting your future behavior, then I didn't see the need for something punitive.
To, to do it. If you just basically wouldn't admit that you ran through the stop sign or you were a jerk or whatever, it's clear. I wasn't going to impact your future behavior. Then my only other option was, well, let's see if a financial penalty will influence your future. Because my role is to, it's not to do anything about the stop sign you just ran.
It's to stop you from doing it again, because that's how I make that intersection safe. Well, you know, there's a lot of discretion. That's discretion, right? I mean, if I talk to Chris and he's a jerk and I don't know it and he gets a ticket and I talked to Steve and I went to high school with him and he's like, [00:03:00] yeah, man, that was stupid.
I normally don't do that. I will never do that again. If I will try to never do that again. I'm really sorry. And I cut you a break. Is that corruption? Because I didn't treat you equally. I may have treated you fairly, but I didn't treat you equally. And so even when you go apples to apples, it's hard, you know, you could get into long discussions, which we did in the leadership course, the ethics section, especially, but throughout the entire course, we got into discussions like this about what corruption was.
Was this okay? Was that okay? What variables would impact whether it was okay or not? And I mean, I found Canadians to be, uh, much more, uh, much less tolerant of. Bad behavior, but also much more reasonable in, like, common sense ways of handling things than in some of the places I was in the States. I mean, we're not all idiots down here.
That got a lot of good answers from US officers too, but it's an interesting conversation, but you do kind of have to be apples to apples. Otherwise it doesn't entirely work. Right? So, but lots of [00:04:00] discretion and and with discretion comes the capability or the possibility of an error in judgment or.
Purposeful corruption that can happen. I was going to say you mentioned something about the trees. Um, like, uh, like the police officers focused on like the individual tree where like the organization is like focused on the forest, right? That's exactly how I would like a police officer to kind of view his job.
Like, how can I make a difference in this, say one individual's life? Like, every day that I'm on the job, I know that's not, you're not going to make a difference every day, obviously, but like, when you have an opportunity to be able to make a difference, say, in one person's life, you mentioned the, like, how can I talk to this person?
So hopefully they don't run through a red light again, you know, or how can I stop this robbery? Or maybe it could actually sit and talk to this criminal or whatever that we had to arrest in the backseat when we're driving them, you know, to where he has to go. And maybe I can say something to him or, or he.
Maybe thanks twice [00:05:00] about what he's doing with his life. Um, to me, that's like, probably the most effective type of policing. If you can go into, and it sounds odd because, you know, like, I'm not a police officer, I'm not going to lie. I don't know a ton of police officers in my life. I got the mustache for it.
Uh, I need to get some aviators. Um, you know what I mean? So that's the way I would like. To view it like there was a part of me when I was growing up, always kind of wanted to be a police officer slash, uh, like, uh, detective always been fascinated by, like, murder mysteries and things of that nature. Um, it's just, I don't know.
It just never happened. But, uh, that's the way I would view the job is like, how can I make a difference in this 1 individual's life? Because to a certain degree, you have a fair amount, a certain amount of power to be able to actually do that. Um, To me, that was the most kind of effective policing. I find a lot of the interactions that I've not so much me personally.
I'm not [00:06:00] ton of interactions with cops, but, uh, the couple that I have, um, I just found like, uh, there was a couple of police officers. We had like, good conversations, like, just simple stuff, you know, like, uh, traffic stuff or what have you, uh, But there was like other times they just didn't seem like they were really interested at all and trying to make a difference.
Well, you bring up a great point. And that is that, you know, uh, the, the person to person connection is the most effective connection. And when you start your career in law enforcement and you're young and your uniform is bright and your badge is not scuffed at all, your shoes are shine, your haircut's fresh and all that.
Um, there's good guys, bad guys, and victims and witnesses, and that's it. It's a very, it's a very black and white kind of world. And at some point in your career, if you're paying attention, …