A PLAN TO END POLICE CORRUPTION

An officer finds himself in a room full of cash and expensive drugs. He
thinks no one is looking and succumbs to temptation, but the cameras were
rolling. He has just failed his integrity test. Randy Boswell explains.

A string of police corruption and misconduct cases across the country has
left law enforcement agencies and their political masters scrambling to pin
the blame on alleged "bad apples" -- a few rotten cops sullying the
collective reputation of a vast, ethical majority of Canadian officers.

But, with more and more wormy fruit suddenly piling up outside police
stations in Toronto, Vancouver, Saskatoon, Edmonton and other major cities,
pressure is also building on chiefs, mayors and premiers to do more to stop
the spoilage before it gets a serious start.

The stakes are huge -- not only for public confidence in Canadian policing
and rank-and-file morale, but also for the potential ballooning costs of
internal investigations, public inquiries, lawsuits and overturned
convictions.

Better police hiring and training practices are considered crucial to
solving the problem. And there are calls for closer supervision of elite and
undercover units, whose members are often subject to less scrutiny but
exposed to more pressure, more career criminals and more temptations.

The possibility of mandatory drug tests for police officers has sparked the
most controversy among the proposed responses to Toronto's high-profile
cases of alleged corruption. But one of the most novel proposals to emerge
is the idea of "integrity testing" to weed out the very worst members of the
country's police corps while deterring others who might be on the brink of
slipping into the quagmire of corruption.

Major metropolitan police forces in the U.S. and Britain are now conducting
both random and targeted ethics experiments -- staged incidents that place
potential wrongdoers in situations that expose their corruptibility -- and
Canadian police departments are being urged to do the same.

During the past decade, police officers in New York City have been
dispatched to hundreds of ersatz drug dens and other fake crime scenes set
up as character laboratories by the NYPD's internal affairs branch. London
has set up a similar integrity monitoring system for police in the British
capital.

The officers sent to these laboratories don't know it's a setup. And how
they react to the piles of cash or wealth of narcotics conveniently left on
the scene -- which is secretly wired for audio and video surveillance --
could determine whether they keep their jobs or get kicked off the force.

The idea recently caught the attention of George Ferguson, the retired
Ontario judge called in by Toronto police Chief Julian Fantino to probe the
corruption crisis gripping the country's largest metropolitan police force.

In a report released in February, Mr. Ferguson pushed for a more proactive,
preventive approach to identifying and dismissing dishonest, and potentially
criminal, officers.

Citing "overwhelming evidence that major police services have been invaded
by serious police misconduct and corruption," Mr. Ferguson emphasized "the
absence of any kind of effective early warning system" was a major part of
the problem.

"It has been well-documented that any truly proactive process to detect and
investigate police misconduct should include targeted integrity testing
provided it is free of any real or perceived element of entrapment," he
concluded. "While targeted integrity testing is an essential tool in the
prevention and detection of police misconduct, it appears that, at the
present time, the Toronto police service does not employ such techniques,
mainly due to a lack of resources."

Earlier this week, Chief Fantino empowered Mr. Ferguson to lead the
implementation of his key recommendations. The force has promised to begin
"spot checks" by senior force officials to make sure officers are following
procedures, but it's not clear yet when or whether a full-blown system of
integrity testing will be launched.

In New York -- repeatedly rocked over the years by high-profile police
corruption scandals -- formal integrity monitoring is serious business. The
city's 40,000 officers know that any time they respond to a call they could
be encountering one of the 1,500 sham drug busts or other manufactured
incidents conducted each year by a specialized unit of the internal affairs
department -- "Integrity Control Officers" -- dedicated to running ethical
litmus tests on their colleagues.

Experiments on officers selected at random from the force have yielded
reassuring results: About one per cent of test subjects make serious
procedural errors and a increasingly small fraction of officers commit
corrupt acts.

But targeted integrity tests, aimed at officers in high-risk units or at
those under suspicion of wrongdoing, have produced failure rates of up to 20
per cent.

Officers committing criminal acts can be removed from the force and
prosecuted.

"The introduction of the system has also seen the reporting of attempts to
bribe police officers soar," notes a report on the New York program by
Transparency International, an anti-corruption advocacy organization with
offices in 85 countries around the world. "Where previously offers of bribes
may have been laughed off and not taken seriously, they now seem to be
reported. No officer can now know whether or not the offer made to him or
her is an 'integrity test,' and it is better to be safe and to report the
incident than risk treating it as an irrelevance -- let alone accept it."

The report concluded there is "no question that integrity testing is a
tremendous deterrent to corrupt activity."

Transparency International's Canadian president, York University business
ethics professor Wes Cragg, says integrity testing makes sense as one part
of an overall strategy to combat corrupt behaviour and misconduct.

"Police have a kind of authority that virtually no other group in our
organized society has," says Mr. Cragg. "And it's quite clear that
establishing confidence in their integrity is extremely important in
maintaining confidence in the whole political system. Clear steps have to be
taken."

He's adamant that for every penalty or deterrent implemented to curb police
misconduct there must be measures for "rewarding people who are committed to
sound ethical standards."

In any police department, says Mr. Cragg, a minority of potential wrongdoers
struggles against a minority of incorruptible officers for control of the
overall culture of the force.

"Generally speaking, there may be as many as 20 per cent who are prepared to
cut corners, if it's to their personal advantage," he says. "There are
usually 20 to 30 per cent in any organization that will maintain sound
ethical values whatever happens. And the rest -- maybe 60 per cent of the
organization -- will be influenced by the culture. And if they believe
people are getting ahead individually -- they're personally enriched or
their status is enhanced by questionable ethical conduct -- then their
behaviour will be influenced."

So integrity testing, in combination with more careful hiring, better
training and a broad education in ethics for all officers, could help
prevent the rot of corruption from taking hold.

"I think we have to become much more intentional about building values of
integrity into our public systems," says Mr. Cragg. "And this could well be
one of the tools."