Richard M. Stana

About the author: Richard M. Stana is the director of justice issues at the U.S. General Accounting Office in Washington, D.C.

Drug-related corruption differs from other types of police corruption. Drug-related corruption includes officers stealing drugs or money from drug dealers, selling drugs, or lying under oath about illegal searches. Officers involved in this type of corruption are actively committing crimes, as opposed to other types of police corruption where the police are either protecting criminals or ignoring their behavior. Several factors are consistently associated with drug-related police corruption: the police culture, characterized by a code of silence; the maturity and education levels of the police officers; ineffective management that does little to promote integrity or supervise officers; opportunity to commit corruption; inadequate...