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5.10 The "rotten apple" view can become quickly and easily enshrined as
departmental doctrine, and stand in the way of reforms. The problem is more acute in the disciplined services where considerations of morale and public image are uppermost in the minds of the leadership echelons. The implications of the "rotten apples" view were examined at length in the "Knapp Commission Report on Police Corruption". This report was submitted to the Mayor of New York in December 1972, bringing to a close the Commission's 2 years investigation into corruption in the New York Folice Department. An extract from this report is reproduced below :-
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Feelings of isolation and hostility are experienced by policemen not just in New York, but everywhere. To understand these feelings one must appreciate an important characteristic of any metropolitan police department, namely an extremely intense group loyalty. When properly understood, this group loyalty can be used in the fight against corruption. If misunderstood or ignored, it can undermine anti-corruption activities.
Pressures that give rise to this group loyalty include the danger to which policemen are constantly exposed and the hostility they encounter from society at large. Everyone agrees that a policeman's life is a dangerous one, and that his safety, not to mention his life, can depend on his ability to rely on a fellow officer in a moment of crisis. It is less generally realized that the policeman works in a sea of hostility. This is true, not only in high crime areas, but throughout the City. Nobody, whether a burglar or a Sunday motorist, likes to have his activities inter- fered with. As a result, most citizens, at one time or another, regard the police with varying degrees of hostility. The policeman feels, and naturally often returns, this hostility.
Two principal characteristics emerge from this group loyalty: suspicion and hostility directed at any outside interference with the Department, and an intense desire to be proud of the Department. This mixture of hostility and pride has created what the Commission has found to be the most serious roadblock to a rational attack upon police corruption: a stubborn refusal at all levels of the Department to acknowledge that a serious problem exists.
The interaction of stubbornness, hostility and pride has given rise to the so-called "rotten-apple" theory. According to this theory, which bordered on official Department doctrine, any policeman found to be corrupt must promptly be denounced as a rotten apple in an otherwise clear barrel. It must never be admitted that his individual corruption may be symptomatic of underlying disease,
This doctrine was bottomed on two basic premises: first, the morale of the Department requires that there be no official recogni- tion of oorruption, even though practically all members of the department know it is in truth extensive; second, the Department's public image and effectiveness require official denial of this truth.
The rotten-apple doctrine has in many ways been a basic obstacle to meaningful reform. To begin with, it reinforced and gave respectability to the code of silence. The official view that the Department's image and morale forbade public disclosure of the
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