Police corruption is an age-old problem in the United States. Reform techniques focused on the malfeasance and misbehavior of individual officers have not succeeded. Better personnel screening, training, internal processes, and functional internal and external integrity units also have not fully addressed the problem. In a very real sense police management has failed. The organizational culture of police agencies is the biggest obstacle to change. It acts as a protective web around departments to discourage deviation from the standard mode of operation; this makes any proposal for change difficult to implement. Law enforcement organizations must embrace ethics as a critical tool for effective decision-making. To truly address the problem, it is necessary to work not only with the officers and the community, but also with professional policing organizations. The culture of being above the law ends only when leaders enforce rules against corrupt behavior and then recognize right behavior.
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Johnson et al. (2014) studied this question.