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Crime, poverty and police corruption in developing countries
23 October 2008
Jens Andvig & Odd-Helge Fjeldstad
Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI)
Corruption is a pervasive and historically persistent part of many police organizations (Faull 2007: 1). It arises in the daily routines of the police. The police’s right to use violence in order to achieve its bureaucratic aims influences its rent collection possibilities. Yet, research on the roles and behavior of the police has been almost neglected in development research. It has mainly been a matter of criminology. During the period of decolonization in the 1960s, however, observers and practitioners were acutely aware of the role of the police and judiciary for development. How eruptions of violence and development might be interlinked was a question of survival for old and new political elites alike. Social scientists applied ‘modernization’ theories to analyze these linkages. For example, they were subtly dealt with in Samuel Huntington’s book, Political Order in Changing Societies (1968). Huntington tied together corruption and violence – thus, also the behavior of the police - to similar forces of deep economic and social change as Emile Durkheim (1897) once did for crime and suicide. Furthermore, the role of the police in India was the subject of an extensive modernization analysis by David Bayley (1969) in the volume The Police and Political Development in India.
More recently, extensive research has been conducted in areas relevant for the analysis of police corruption: (i) the economics of crime and corruption in general have gained increasing interest since the late 1970s; and (ii) the economics of armed conflicts started to grow around 1980.1 There has been a particular focus on large scale civil war, but an important outgrowth has been the study of illegal markets and organized crime. One important result of this research is the demonstration that the optimal scale of organized crime units is clearly linked to police behavior, increasing with its degree of corruption and inefficiency (Reuter 1983).
The criminal justice system as it is known today evolved during the same historical period as the modern state arose (Newman 1999). This also applies to most police organizations. The police are everywhere a public, bureaucratic organization with clear hierarchic features and with the same core tasks although differing in details. This implies that observations and experiences from one country might be relevant for others. Well-documented case studies of corruption in police organizations in cities like New York, Los Angeles or London may prove more relevant for the understanding of police corruption in Mumbai or Jakarta than the striking differences in the surrounding poverty and efficiency levels would lead us to believe. Information on the internal organization of police corruption is not, however, in a form that easily allows cross-country quantitative comparisons.
How is police corruption linked to the wider processes of development – including crime, violence and poverty? Recently the degree of protection of property rights - widely defined - has been considered as a key institution and assigned large weight in determining economic growth rates (Acemoglu et al. 2001, 2005). The police, together with the courts, are the public institution most directly involved in determining and defending the actual distribution of property rights. Obviously, the police - as the most directly interfering among the repressive public institutions - may have strong impacts on interpersonal behavior and the de facto determination of property rights in any society through their ability to sanction and punish with or without basis in law.
Not only the actual degree of protection, but also the legitimacy of the actual distribution of
property rights has been demonstrated to be important in economic development (ibid). Illegitimate
distributions are usually also highly skewed and seem to have strong impact on crime rates, and, thus, on police tasks.2 In the many slum areas of the poorer countries where the authorities are not in
full control, the police’s instruments of violence are often actively in use to determine the short run allocation of property rights, to collect taxes (bribes) and to overview law and order to the degree that it exists. Police corruption in these settings may increase the uncertainty of the property rights of the very poor, rights that often are threatened by semi-legal actions of the well-off as well as by actions of neighborhood criminals. To disclose the connections between economic inequality and economic growth is a key and persistent theme in economic development research. Again, the police are an important link in an institutional nexus now considered key to development.
Another important transmission mechanism that links police behavior to development is working through crime. High crime rates may have devastating impacts on investments and economic growth. Countries with high crime rates often find it difficult to attract, retain, and expand private investment.3 In addition to deterring investments, crime has direct costs on firms (and households) through theft losses and in security-related expenses, which translate into reduced competitiveness and lower investment (sometimes even disinvestments). One of the key difficulties when relating police corruption to crime rates, however, is that it together with the overall police efficiency may have significant impact on crime statistics. It influences both the public’s and the police’s reporting of crime.
The main purpose of this paper is to explore and clarify the relations between police corruption and the more fundamental welfare-shaping processes in poor and semi-poor countries. We will mainly examine the roles of the police and its task structure in areas where the political leadership of a country is not physically threatened, but where corruption is extensive in the government apparatus. When physically threatened, a more explicit analysis of the police’s political roles is required.
The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 starts out by establishing a working definition of police corruption, which includes acts of extortion by the police. It also includes a brief discussion of data sources for analyzing police corruption. In Section 3 police tasks and their scope for corruption are addressed. Section 4 examines whether – and why - the police is more or less corrupt than other groups of public officials. How and why police corruption varies across countries are examined in Section 5, followed by a discussion in Section 6 of the wider impacts of police corruption on development. Section 7 concludes by exploring policy measures to address police corruption.
Footnotes
- Both build upon earlier extensions of economics, i.e. the economics of crime (Becker 1968) and the economics of organizations (Williamson 1981).
- Some research has been done that links crime and violence to economic inequality (Bourguignon 1999).
- The World Bank’s ‘Doing business’ surveys find that African business leaders are twice as likely to say that crime is a major impediment to investment than their peers in other parts of the world (World Bank 2007).
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