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Introduction
Police scandals during the last two decades of the twentieth century exposed dramatic cases of drug-related corruption in several major American cities. The scandals arose just as the nation embarked on a high-profile campaign to intensify drug enforcement and the ongoing "war on drugs," an irony that generated both public outrage and appeals to stem the corrosive influence of drugs on street-level policing ([13] Dombrink, 1988). Scandal emerged in Miami (FL) with the criminal indictment of a band of rogue cops dubbed as the "River Gang" who specialized in the shakedown and theft of drug dealers ([34] Sechrest and Burns, 1992). Scandal also erupted in two New York City precincts where investigations uncovered wide-scale drug corruption including police who burglarized drug dens, trafficked in stolen drugs, and robbed drug dealers and their customers ([3] Baer and Armao, 1995). In Los Angeles (CA), officers assigned to the Rampart division of the LAPD committed acts of drug-related corruption that involved participation in a bank robbery, the theft of cocaine from a police evidence room, and the beating of an arrested drug dealer ([27] Los Angeles Police Department, 2000). A report of the US General Accounting Office (GAO) outlined other contemporary drug-related corruption scandals in Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, New Orleans, and Philadelphia ([43] US General Accounting Office, 1998).
The scandals in New York City culminated in the establishment of a delegation to investigate corruption in the New York City Police Department (NYPD) commonly referred to as the Mollen Commission ([30] Mollen Commission, 1994). The two-year investigation identified an emergent nexus between police misconduct and the operation of drug markets that had transformed the composition of police corruption. Whereas previous scandals usually arose within the context of payoffs tied to gambling or prostitution rackets, the Commission described how the burgeoning narcotics trade had become the source for more "aggressive, extortionate, and often violent" corruption that "parallel[ed] the violent world of drug trafficking [...] The distinction between the criminal and the corrupt cop has disappeared. Corrupt cops no longer merely use their authority to exact payoffs; they now actively engage in criminal activity" ([3] Baer and Armao, 1995, p. 76). The Commission highlighted the role of cocaine and crack markets that afforded opportunities to use illegal drugs as...