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xtent of corruption inhibited any officer who wished to disclose corruption and justified any who preferred to remain silent. The doctrine also made difficult, if not impossible, any meaningful attempt at managerial reform. A high command unwilling to acknowledge that the problem of corruption is extensive cannot very well argue that drastic changes are necessary to deal with that problem. Thuc neither the Mayor's Office ner the Police Department took adequate steps to seo that such changes were made when the need for then wes indicated by the charges made by Officers Frank Serpico and David Durk in 1968. This was demonstrated in the Commission's second set of public hearings in December 1971."
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Although the problons described are of particular relevance to Police Forces throughout the world, almost all of the points made here are applicable, though to a different degree, to all disciplined services engaged in law enforcement.
Over-reliance on Forms of Control
Senior officers who hold the "rotten apple" view may genuinely have been misled by their junior officers and could thereby have grossly under- estimated the size of the problem of corruption. In the day to day administration of any complex organisation, senior officers tend to rely on information passed to them by their junior officers. They can be inundated by statistical returns and reports and can become trapped at their desks by a great weight of day to day administrative detail as well as by long term policy matters. In the circumstances, they are unable to get out and about, to reach down, to the extent necessary for them to really understand the situation on the ground and to question junior staff. There is hence the obvious danger of wrong, fabricated, diluted or slanted information being fed to their supervisors by junior officers, whether for corrupt or other reasons, thus establishing for senior officers an illusion of efficiency and achievement.
5.12 Perhaps no better illustration can be found of the case with which senior officers can be misled into thinking that all is well, than in the succession of syndicated corruption cases which have come before the courts in recent years. Some of these cases illustrated how a parallel system of corruption can operate side by side with the day to day, legitimate business of a Police Division or Sub-division, A disturbing feature of those cases was the apparent ease with which an environment of corruption becane entrenched. Witnesses testified that corrupt officers, posted from one station or duty to another, were immediately admitted to syndicates already established in their new area, thus illustrating how corruption syndicates can have an existence of their own regardless of the coming and going of individual members, and how all pervading an atmosphere of corruption can become. It is ironic that in some of the arces where syndicated corruption has been revealed, the general crime situation and the ufficiency of the Station involved looked satisfactory to senior Police officers within the Command.
5.13 As a general cbservation, it seems that a high level of apparent
efficiency is no guarantee against the existence of syndicated corruption. Senior officers can grow accustomed to relying on the forms of order and control within their area of responsibility and fail to realize the need to look behind the apparent officiency which becomes a thin veil for serious, repeated, and widespread irregularities. Undoubtedly, this
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