A Former Chief of Police Exposes Police Culture: Corruption, Abuse, and Heroism (2001)

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The blue wall of silence, also blue code and blue shield, are terms used in the United States to denote the unwritten rule that exists among police officers not to report on a colleague's errors, misconducts, or crimes. About the book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003980ICU/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp;=1789&creative;=9325&creativeASIN;=B003980ICU&linkCode;=as2&tag;=tra0c7-20&linkId;=c46fc19290d975baa009ecc7dc97c650 If questioned about an incident of misconduct involving another officer (e.g. during the course of an official inquiry), while following the code, the officer being questioned would claim ignorance of another officer's wrongdoing. The code is considered to be police corruption and misconduct. Any officers who engaged in discriminatory arrests, physical or verbal harassment, and selective enforcement of the law are considered to be corrupt. Many officers who follow the code may participate in some of these acts during their career for personal matters or in order to protect or support fellow officers.[4] All of these are considered illegal offenses and are grounds for suspension or immediate dismissal. Officers who follow the code are unable to report fellow officers who participate in corruption due to the unwritten laws of their "police family." Police perjury or "testilying" (in United States police slang) is when an officer gives false testimony in court. Officers who do not lie in court may sometimes be threatened and ostracized by fellow police officers. In 1992, the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Police Corruption (also known as the Mollen Commission) undertook a two-year investigation on perjury in law enforcement. They discovered that some officers falsified documents such as arrest reports, warrants and evidence for an illegal arrest or search. Some police officers also fabricated stories to a jury. The Commission found that the officers were not lying for greed but because they believed that they were imprisoning people who deserved it. Many prosecutors allowed police perjury to occur, as well. Police culture or “cop culture," as it is sometimes called by police officers, has resulted in a barrier against stopping corrupt officers. Police culture involves a set of values and rules that have evolved through the experiences of officers and which are affected by the environment in which they work. From the beginning of their career at their academies, police are brought into this “cop culture." While learning jobs and duties, recruits will also learn the values needed to make it to a high rank in their organization. Some words used to describe these values are as follows: a sense of mission, action, cynicism, pessimism, machismo, suspicion, conservatism, isolation and solidarity. The unique demands that are placed on police officers, such as the threat of danger, as well as scrutiny by the public, generate a tightly woven environment conducive to the development of feelings of loyalty.[7] These values are claimed to lead to the code; isolation and solidarity leading to police officers sticking to their own kind, producing an us-against-them mentality. The us-against-them mentality that can result leads to officers backing each other up and staying loyal to one another; in some situations it leads to not “ratting” on fellow officers.[8] A Los Angeles Times report about the "Facebook manifesto" of Christopher Dorner, who was killed during a police manhunt after he went on a several day shooting spree in February 2013 in Southern California, observes: "When he arrived at the LAPD, he wrote, he found it a nest of racists. In the Police Academy, he complained about another recruit’s use of a racial slur and was shunned. On patrol with the LAPD, he complained that his training officer had kicked a mentally ill man, and in response the department conspired to destroy him. He had dared, he said, to violate the Code of Silence. One method of preventing the code from penetrating the police force is exposure. Many states have taken measures in police academies to promote the exposure of the blue code. In most cities, before being admitted into the academy one must pass a criminal background check. Through additional background checks, polygraph testing, and psychological evaluations, certain departments are better able to select individuals who are less likely to condone wrongdoing. In these departments, police are exposed to a basic training curriculum that instructs on ethical behavior; this instruction is reinforced in seminars and classes annually in some cases. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_wall_of_silence