Police Officers and Gratuities PDF

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An essay on Police Officers and Gratuities....

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Running head: POLICE GRATUITIES

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Police Officers and Gratuities

Abstract This paper presents the issue of police officers in America accepting gratuities. Gratuity acceptance has been a proved practice by all corrupt officers. The debate between zero tolerance policies and reasonable policies will also be compared.

Police Officers and Gratuities

[Heading 1] According to the IACP a gratuity is defined as, ‘’any discount, gift, or benefit one receives by virtue of their profession.’’ Many police departments across the country have a policy similar to the IACP model to prevent their officers from becoming corrupt. The smallest acceptance of gratuities lead to corruption. The only difference between accepting a free cup of coffee and accepting $100 cash is the degree of wrongness. When a police officer gets into the habit of accepting things for free, it can become very easy to start accepting larger bribes. ‘’Each gratuity by itself may be small, but the cumulative effect is said to be great. The merchant supplying the cup of coffee will ultimately receive a disproportionate amount of police services at the expense of other merchants. The police need the community's support to properly do their job. The police must be perceived as an honest group of crime fighters, not a bunch of coffee mooching do-nothings.’’ (Petrocelli, 1) A big problem with gratuities are when police officers begin to expect a gratuity. In order to have a crime, you must have an act and intent. The act would be the discount. If the police officer believes he is deserved a gratuity, this can be the intent because he has an expectation of what he/she deserves. A police officer should never think that they are owed anything from the public, and the police officer should never show favoritism towards the employees or businesses that give him/her gratuities. The same belief goes towards the employees and businesses, they should not think that for giving police officers free things that they will be exempt from any violations of the law.

If the police officer does not have an expectation of a gratuity, and the employees or businesses do not expect anything in return, the question of why are gratuities still being offered and accepted still exists. One reason that gratuities are still offered and accepted even without any expectations, is because some members of society are happy to live in a safe place and understand the hardships a police officer goes through on a daily basis to keep our communities safe, these members of society understand that a police officer goes to work every day with their life at risk, so they just want to take that one moment they have with a police officer to show recognition and appreciation to the police officers. Detective Joseph Petrocelli makes the argument that police departments should have Reasonable Tolerance policies according to gratuities instead of Zero Tolerance policies. He states that with any issue there are extremes, for example a police officer shouldn’t be running protection rackets, but it wouldn’t be a big deal if a brownie was accepted from a nun after helping her replace a flat tire, or paying half price at the local coffee shop. Detective Joseph Petrocelli believes that there is not anything wrong with accepting small gratuities that are in recognition of the police officers efforts. I can’t agree with Detective Petrocelli’s statements because it is easier said than done. We can put a ‘’reasonable policy’’ on anything but it just takes one person to ruin it for everyone, as with anything else. For example, on the parkway there aren’t many people driving early in the mornings or late at night, if the idea was proposed that the speed limit should be raised to 100mph during those times but remain 55mph and 65mph during high commuter times because it is reasonable that people can drive faster when there are less people on the roads which means there won’t be accidents. In theory it sounds great, but realistically eventually something will happen because someone took advantage of this raise in the speed limit or someone does not

even have the abilities to control their vehicle safely at these speeds. This is the same idea that I have towards a ‘’reasonable policy’’ on police officers accepting gratuities. It is easy to say to have a policy like that, and it would only work in a perfect world. Again thinking realistically, eventually some officers will start taking that snowball effect from free coffees to accepting cash during traffic stops, leaking police information to organized crime groups, and so on. I am sure most people in the department can handle just accepting small gratuities but we have to have a zero tolerance policy due to that one guy that can’t control himself. It will also be a lot easier to catch someone accepting small gratuities and giving them a penalty for it than for a reasonable policy to be in play leaving a grey area and not knowing what is right to take or wrong to take. It can be up to the supervisor in charge of penalizing police officers who accept gratuities to use their judgment in the severity of the acceptances, if the supervisor notices a problem possibly occurring than they can take the initiative of investigating further but if the supervisor believes it’s not an issue than they can just remind the officer that we do not accept gratuities. Conclusion It is proven that corrupt police officers all started out accepting small gratuities. The most effective way of controlling how many corrupt officers we have is to just have a zero tolerance policy. Only in a perfect world is where we can have a reasonable policy because not all members of the police department will follow the reasonable policy, and it will be much easier for them to veer off into a corrupt policing style from the practice of accepting small gratuities. It’s almost like marijuana being the gateway drug, some people can just use marijuana but then you have the people who go past marijuana and start using cocaine, meth, heroin, etc....