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Police corruption is a specific form of police misconduct sometimes involving political corruption, and generally designed to gain a financial or political benefit for a police officer or officers in exchange for not pursuing, or selectively pursuing, an investigation or arrest.
An example is police officers accepting bribes in exchange for not reporting organized drug or prostitution rings or other illegal activities.
Police corruption can involve a single officer or group of officers, or can be the standard practice of entire police precincts or departments. In most major cities there are internal affairs sections to investigate suspected police corruption or misconduct. However, sometimes the corruption is so widespread that investigation requires an external body with far reaching powers, such as the Kennedy commission in Australia.
Police corruption is frequently the subject of television: dramas and documentaries have widely covered these. In particular,Our Friends in the North covered this subject in depth. More recently, Philip Glenister starred in Life on Mars as a seemingly corrupt police officer called Gene Hunt working for Manchester City Police in the early 1970s.
The Bill also has covered this topic, although it is set in a more contemporary timeframe than Life on Mars. The portrayals have been either realistic (as in Life on Mars) or in some dramas, overblown and showy.
On documentaries, such as The World's Wildest Police Videos, Police Stop! (and to a lesser extent, although covered in the episodes Don't Look Back In Anger from November 1997, and Fair Cop made in September 2000), ITV's Police, Camera, Action! the subject has been covered. However, the reports on these were of a serious bent, indicating the problems caused by corruption in British police forces.