An agent‐based model of police corruption
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Author | Haci Duru,Joseph Cochran |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12474 |
Received: 8 April 2 021 Accepted: 13 October 2021
DOI: 10.1111/ho jo.12474
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
An agent-based model of police corruption
Haci Duru Joseph Cochran
Haci Duru is Assistant Professor and
Joseph Cochran is Lecturer, Department
of Criminal Justice, State University of
New York(SUNY), Brockport, NY, USA
Correspondence
Haci Duru, Assistant Professor,
Department of Criminal Justice, State
University of New York(SUNY),
Brockport, NY,USA.
Email: hduru@brockport.edu
Abstract
Police corruption, especially in the form of bribery, is a
severe social problem in many societies. However, nei-
ther the extent nor the factors contributing to police
bribery are well understood because of data limitation
issues. Understandably, it is incredibly challenging to
observe and quantify such bribery,as it is usually consid-
ered illegal and/or unethical for police to accept and/or
ask for bribes. Agent-based modelling can solve such
data limitation issues because it allows for the real-
istic modelling of hidden behaviours. This study uses
an agent-based modelling technique to investigate a
threshold model of police corruption, more specifically,
bribery. The authors assume that agents have a thresh-
old regarding bribery, which may be conceptualised as
either an honesty threshold or a risk threshold. The
threshold value is a dynamic variable randomlyassigned
to each agent, and each interaction between citizens and
officers possesses the potential to change the threshold
of each agent.
KEYWORDS
agent-based modelling, corruption, police, threshold
1 INTRODUCTION
Police corruption is a major problem because it destroys the relationship between the public and
the police (Bayley & Perito, 2011). We do not exactly know the scale and scope of the problem
though because of the challenges related to gathering data on police corruption. First, it is hidden
from the public eye because the people involved in corruption haveevery reason to keep it hidden
© 2022 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Howard J. Crim. Justice. 2022;61:289–309. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hojo 289
290 THE HOWARDJOURNAL OF CRIME AND JUSTICE
due to the financial, legal, and social consequences that they would suffer if they were caught
(Ivković, 2003). Second, in many cases, the people with the required experience and knowledge
that would allow them to detect corruption, the police, are the ones who have been corrupted
(Ivković, 2003). Third, in some cases, the institutions which should be protecting society from
corrupt police, such as police departments, also participate in the corruption (Ivković, 2009).
Therefore, it is challenging for society to detect police corruption and for researchers to collect
data about police corruption. Nonetheless, scholars have collected data on police corruption from
various sources. These sources include reports of blue-ribbon commissions (Knapp, 1972; Mollen
Commission, 1994), civil and criminal investigations of the police, the public media, observations,
surveys of police officers (Klockars, 2000; Weisburd, Greenspan & Hamilton, 2000) and civilians,
and accounts of those who were involved in corruption themselves (Anderson, 1998;Bayley&
Perito, 2011; Ivković, 2003).
Scholars have proposed several theories to explain why police corruption occurs (Newburn,
1999). Among them are:
1. The code of the silence among police officers (Henry, 1994; Mollen Commission, 1994; Wood,
1997).
2. Individual officer characteristics (i.e., ‘bad apples’) (Ivković et al., 2002;Tankebe,2010).
3. Opportunistic circumstances (Dunnighan & Norris, 1998; Moran, 2005; Porter & Warrender,
2009).
4. Organisational characteristics (Porter,2005; Wolfe & Piquero, 2011).
5. Neighborhood and community characteristics (Goldstein, 1975;Knapp,1972;Mollen Commis -
sion, 1994; Wood, 1997).
6. The political environment (Agbiboa, 2015).
Each of these theories may explain individual occurrences of police corruption, though none
of them seems to apply to every occurrence of police corruption. Despite their differences, many
of these theories cover much of the same ground regarding police corruption.
However, one other plausible explanation has been largely ignored in the extant literature.
Citizens’ and police officers’ past experiences about corruption and their variable propensities
towards corruption may also influence the prevalence of police corruption, similar in nature to
the fatalism that develops with populations which suffer from extreme police brutality (Tankebe,
2013, 2019). Within this study, we propose that everyonehas a propensity for corruption and this
propensity determines how likely it is that an individual is going to participate in corruption
(either accepting corruption or initiating corruption). An individual’s propensity level is not a
constant, it is not an innate trait that they are born with, but varies over time because of the indi-
vidual’s past experiences with corruption.
It is not easy to test our proposition by collecting real-world data because that test would need
granular data at the individual and situational levels that would be difficult, if not impossible, to
collect. However, it is possible to simulate such data using agent-based modelling techniques and
to test this proposition using the simulated data. In this study, we usesuch a technique to do just
that. In the next section, we present a brief discussion of police corruption and the agent-based
modelling technique. Then we detail the specifics of five agent-based models we used to answer
two research questions. The remaining sections are methods and results of the empirical study
and the discussion of our findings.
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