Police Gifts and Benefits Scandals: Addressing Deficits in Policy, Leadership and Enforcement

Abstract

This paper examines three recent high-profile cases involving gifts and benefits to police. The cases, two from Australia and one from England, involved both frontline officers and senior managers. The analyses track the unfolding scandals, and how they were investigated and evaluated by official inquiries. In two of the cases, gifts and hospitality were enmeshed with wider forms of corruption. The official inquiries identified how gratuities undermined public confidence in the impartiality of police, and how inappropriate gifts and benefits were facilitated by liberal policies and deficient leadership. The paper concludes by arguing that police need to adopt a highly restrictive policy on gratuities, and follow through with effective forms of compliance management.

Police foundation governance and accountability: Corporate interlocks and private, nonprofit influence on public police

“…While education is one possible counter-gift (and by no means necessarily a problematic one), existing literature on corporate sponsorships and donations to police and other institutions provides reason to suspect other possible returns (Coleman, 2004; Prenzler et al, 2013). Interested in these other possible counter-gifts, we encouraged board members during interviews to reveal more.…”

“…The police foundation phenomenon is connected to debates in literature on private sponsorship of public policing and donations (Coleman, 2004; Prenzler et al, 2013). In the UK, police sponsorship commenced in 1994 and by 2013 was generating 1 percent of police departments’ revenue (Loader et al, 2014: 476).…”

Going to the dogs? Police, donations, and K9s

“…Though mentioned in previous studies (Ayling et al, 2009;Grabosky, 2007), there is still only limited research on police-corporate "partnerships" despite their growth in North American police departments. There is a longstanding debate in criminal justice ethics on police gifts and gratuities that weighs the limits of donations to individual police officers (Prenzler et al, 2013). The focus of this literature is on how interpersonal gifts and gratuities can create a perception and reality of corruption, concerns recently extending to sponsorship and donations at the institutional police level (Luscombe et al, forthcoming).…”

Measuring Police Integrity Across the World

“…As one example, in 2011-2012, a scandal forced the Queensland Police Service to adopt a more explicit policy, and an internal communications strategy, to try to reduce police acceptance of gifts and benefits (Prenzler et al 2013). Several years earlier, the police response to a similar scandal in Victoria became lost in bureaucratic inaction.…”