Situational corruption prevention

Abstract

This chapter tests the hypothesis that situational crime prevention techniques can be useful :n preventing police corruption. A situational analysis was made of police complaints files as an example of how this could be initiated. Using three years of complaints data, productive analysis was made of four categories of corruption involving misuse of authority for a reward or a breach of criminal law. The categories were opportunistic thefts, driving under the influence of alcohol, assault (while off duty) and theft from employer. The analysis identified opportunity factors that could be addressed with situational techniques including forms of target hardening, access control, rule setting and compliance facilitation. The findings indicated that with a larger data set more categones of police corruption and misconduct would be amenable to this type of analysis.