To be convicted, the plaintiffs must prove that the officer was following the "code" or participating in negligence and unlawful conduct.
[5] The U.S. Supreme Court has consistently held that officers be given the benefit of the doubt that they acted lawfully in fulfilling their duties, a position reaffirmed in Saucier v. Katz, 533 U.S. 194 (2001).
They claimed that the beating was lawful, but it was not until a videotape of the incident was released when it was confirmed that the officers had collectively fabricated their stories.
In the later 1990s, the FBI arrested 42 officers from five law enforcement agencies in 1998 on charges of conspiracy to distribute cocaine.
Many members of the Ku Klux Klan were police officers who protected each other when conducting racist acts.
[5] "Additionally, a string of landmark Supreme Court decisions during the era gave new force both to individual privacy rights as well as to curbs upon Police Power: highly influential cases resulted in the strengthening of Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable Search and Seizure, evidentiary rules forbidding the use at trial of evidence tainted by unconstitutional police actions, and the establishment of the so-called Miranda Warning requiring officers to advise detained suspects of their constitutional rights.
"[5] This would result in the criminalization of officers who (1) did not have the necessary paperwork to conduct a search or (2) were involved in falsifying documents or committing perjury.
A double standard exists of perceived rewards[8] or a dismissal of charges for an officer with overwhelming evidence of guilt[9] for unlawful criminal offenses.
This double standard is further supported by police commands providing the “slap on the wrist” after strategizing a delay to reduce public media attention.
Police culture involves a set of values and rules that have evolved through the experiences of officers and which are affected by the environment in which they work.
Some words used to describe these values are as follows: a sense of mission, action, cynicism, pessimism, machismo, suspicion, conservatism, isolation and solidarity.
The unique demands that are placed on police officers, such as the threat of danger, as well as scrutiny by the public, generate a tightly woven environment conducive to the development of feelings of loyalty.
The code has been called "America's Most Successful Stop Snitchin' Campaign", referring to cases where police covered up the misdeeds of fellow officers and where whistleblowers were harassed, professionally sanctioned, or forced into retirement.
Through additional background checks, polygraph testing, and psychological evaluations, certain departments are better able to select individuals who are less likely to condone wrongdoing.
[17] Several campaigns against the blue code of silence or for making it more visible in the public eye have taken place in the United States.
Over 20 years after the Knapp Commission the Mollen Commission was established in 1992 by New York City Mayor David Dinkins to investigate the nature and extent of corruption in the New York City Police Department NYPD, and to recommend changes to improve these procedures.