Assisting the police to do their job? Liberal - progressives and the hegemonic construction of police corruption in New South Wales

The IPES Working Paper Series is an open forum for the global community of police experts, researchers, and practitioners provided by the International Police Executive Symposium (IPES). This paper is a theoretically based work that examines the validity of the notion of a police 'culture of corruption'. This notion has clearly swept the field of criminology in terms of explaining the deviance of rank-and-file police. We use empirical evidence drawn from public sources to problematise this notion as simplistic and misdirected. Gramsci's theory of hegemony and an understanding of the methodological limitations of certain approaches to studies of policing are used to explain the pervasive but wrongheaded status of the 'culture of corruption' thesis. We also contend that there is a political dimension to the elevation of this thesis to hegemonic status, again explicable in Gramscian terms. Particular individual agents are examined briefly to exemplify the way that hegemonic blocs of the state's executive and, in this case, academics, form and re-form. In places in this examination and in conclusion, we propose a more materialist and structuralist model for studying corruption in police forces, based on ideas such as social class, exploitation, resistance, class struggle, division of labour, alienation, and class consciousness.