Corrupt police networks: uncovering hidden relationship patterns, functions and roles

This paper applies social network analysis techniques to a case study of police corruption in order to produce findings that will assist in corruption prevention and investigation. Police corruption is commonly studied, but rarely are sophisticated tools of analyses engaged to add rigour to the field of study. This paper analyses the ‘First Joke’, a systemic and long-lasting corruption network in the Queensland Police Force, a state police agency in Australia. It uses the data obtained from a commission of inquiry that exposed the network, and develops hypotheses as to the nature of the networks structure based on existing literature into dark networks and criminal networks. These hypotheses are tested by entering the data into UCINET and analysing the outcomes through social network analysis measures of average path distance, centrality and density. The conclusions reached show that the network has characteristics not predicted by the literature.