Markets in Vice, Markets in Virtue

corrupt activities (e.g., bribes) because the citizens involved are voluntary participants. A third major impediment to effective corruption control is that the police and others in government have major incentives to turn a blind eye to it. When corruption is publicly disclosed, the resulting scandal often damages the reputation of the police department and government officials with oversight of police operations. Police and other officials thus have a perverse incentive to ignore the problem as a means to avoid the damage that public disclosure will likely engender. A fourth impediment to corruption control is that no single entity in our socio-legal system has responsibility for controlling police corruption—police administrators, local elected officials, prosecutors, and the court system all have some oversight responsibility. The dispersion of responsibility makes it difficult to develop coordinated corruption control efforts and makes it easy for the various agencies to expect the others to bear the brunt of the corruption control burden. Fallen Blue Knights breaks no new ground in its discussion of the various points proffered about the nature of corruption and the problems associated with controlling it, for all of them have been raised by the healthy number of academic and governmental inquiries into corruption that have been undertaken in the last several decades. And while a review of what has been reported in previous examinations of corruption is certainly necessary in a book such as Fallen Blue Knights, the number of pages devoted to it could have been shortened considerably. A shorter treatment of the extant literature would have permitted the reader to get more quickly to the guts of what Fallen Blue Knights is about: Ivkovic’s proposal for controlling corruption. In the last chapter of the book, Ivkovic calls for the development of a new sort of oversight entity that would essentially direct, coordinate, and oversee corruption control activities for individual police agencies. This new entity, which she dubs “The Integrity-Enhancing Agency (IEA),” would be staffed by legal professionals and social scientists who would have a variety of powers (including subpoena power) to analyze trends in corrupt activities, conduct research designed to identify and short-circuit problems that might give rise to corruption, provide policy recommendations for corruption control, and monitor the anti-corruption activities undertaken by the police department it oversees, among other things. Ivkovic’s IEA idea has its roots in a variety of sorts of police oversight programs currently operating around the nation, such as the citizen review committees and independent monitors that operate in several major jurisdictions. As Ivkovic notes, these existing programs face a number of challenges (e.g., political infighting, lack of fiscal support, and operational limitations) that crimp their effectiveness. While she is optimistic that the IEAs would be able to overcome such obstacles, there is little reason to suspect that the social and political circumstances that have subverted previous corruption control efforts will dissolve in the face of the IEA. It would therefore appear that the IEA model has a tougher row to hoe than Ivkovic has suggested. Because the costs of police corruption are so high and the need for a solution to this problem is so great, however, Ivkovic’s IEA proposal is a welcome addition to the world of ideas about how to improve policing.