Social Determinants of Police Corruption: Toward Public Policies for the Prevention of Police Corruption

Strategies for the prevention of police corruption, for example,bribery, commonly neglects its social dimension in spite of thefact that police corruption has societal causes and undertakinga reform of the police requires, to some extent, reformingsociety. In this paper, we built a decision tree from socioeconomicprofiles of 103 countries classified according to their level of policecorruption using data from the United Nations Statistics Divisionand Transparency International. From the rules of the resultantdecision tree, we identified and analyzed social determinants of policecorruption to assist policy-makers in designing societal level strategiesto control police corruption by improving socioeconomic conditions.We found that school life expectancy, involvement of women in society,economic development, and work-related indicators are relevant topolice corruption. Moreover, empirical results indicate that countriesshould gradually improve social indicators to reduce police corruption.