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Tarnished Badges – The History of Corruption
in the Police Department
By
Linda Canada, For The Paper Store, Inc., July, 1999
The skin of the man
lying on the ground was dark by nature, his original pigmentation made
darker still by the impact of repeated blows from four nightsticks. Four
nightsticks held by four sets of hands with pigmentation of a lighter
degree. A crowd of about a dozen or so stood by casually, their
nightsticks idle as they watched the scene unfold, a scene that would
end with a final score of nightsticks 56, victim 0 (Dempsey, 1994).
This particular
scene was not an occurrence from America’s turbulent 1960s, however much
it might resemble an event from that era. Nor was it a vigilante
incident from the frontier days of America’s wild and untamed west. The
scene described above is circa late twentieth century America, Los
Angeles, California in March of 1991, to be exact (Dempsey, 1994). This
scene, a scene that a passerby happened to capture while out
experimenting with his new video camera, was to be replayed countless
times across the screens of America’s television sets during the coming
weeks. This scene, which depicted the assault of California resident
Rodney King by four Los Angeles police officers, told a shocked America
that all was not well within its law enforcement system. This scene,
followed by a trial in which all four officers were acquitted, attested
to the fact that, despite a number of reforms and improvement measures,
corruption still exists in America’s police departments (Dempsey, 1994).
The history of
the organized police force is a checkered one, and it is a concept that
dates back to the days of the early Romans emperors. One of these
emperors, Augustus, established one of the earliest law enforcement
organizations known to the world about the time Jesus Christ was born
(Dempsey, 1994). The sole purpose of this organization, known as the
Praetorian Guard, was the protection of the emperor and palace. Augustus
followed this organization with the formation of the Praefectus Urbi, an
urban force designed to protect the city of Rome (Dempsey, 1994). A
third organization established by Augustus, a group known as the Vigiles
of Rome, were originally formed to fight fires in the city of Rome, but
eventually took on the responsibility of patrolling the city’s streets
in an effort to protect Roman citizens from crime. It is from this
organization that the word and the concept of vigilante originated
(Dempsey, 1994).

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