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Rotten Apple Hypothesis Examples

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Police corruption is an on going battle in the police force now a days. There are many different hypotheses for it to include the Society-at-Large hypothesis, Structural or Affiliation hypothesis, and the Rotten Apple hypothesis. Also there is the slippery slope theory as well. First lets look at the slippery slope. A slippery slope is defined as “a process or series of events that is hard to stop or control once is has begun and that usually leads to worse or more difficult things”(Merriam Webster, 2015) . In other words once you start down a slippery slope it is almost impossible to stop the fall. An example of a slippery slope is an officer gets a feel meal at a certain fast food restaurant, so now every time they go there they expect to get that free meal. Later on down the road that could turn into having people give him money to get out of a traffic ticket and eventually harsher crimes. Finally that all ends up becoming where the officer is now paid off by a drug lord to turn a blind eye to his drugs being sold how the …show more content…

The Rotten Apple hypothesis is that some officers are just not suited for law enforcement. These officers were found to get in due to poor recruiting methods. An example of this would be having an officer get through the recruiting process and that officer has ties to local gangs which in turn allows the gangs to break in to places with the officer to burglarize it and having the cop provide alibies for the event for the members who were involved in the event. When ever an officer is caught whether they are indeed a bad seed or not the department says the person was a Bad Apple to try and deflect the attention from them. This is why many believe that the Rotten Apple hypothesis is a myth. However there could be a better explanation that is a little closer to the truth, which could be the individual just made a really bad decision and now is having to pay the consequences for that

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