Police misconduct refers to inappropriate actions taken by police officers in connection with their official duties. Police misconduct can lead to a miscarriage of justice and sometimes involves discrimination. In an effort to control police misconduct, there is an accelerating trend for civilian agencies to go beyond review to engage directly in investigations and to have much greater input into disciplinary decisions.
- False Confession
- A false confession is an admission of guilt in a crime in which the confessor is not responsible for the crime. False confessions can be induced through coercion by the police or by the mental disorder or incompetency of the accused. Even though false confessions might appear to be an exceptional and unlikely event, they occur on a regular basis in case law, which is one of the reasons why jurisprudence has established a series of rules to detect, and subsequently reject, false confessions. These are called the "confession rules."
- Falsified Evidence
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Falsified evidence, forged evidence or tainted evidence or misleading by suppressing evidence unfavourable for the police/prosecution, is used to either convict an innocent person, or to guarantee conviction of a guilty person.
The planting of a drugs at a crime scene would be used by the police to prove a defendant guilty of possession or other drug crimes. The fact that the police/prosecution, (one of the parties with a vested interest in a trial), effectively controls the supply of most or all of the evidence, is a fundamental problem of the adversarial trial system.
- False imprisonment
- False imprisonment is a restraint of a person in a bounded area without justification or consent. False imprisonment is a common-law felony. It applies to private as well as governmental detention. When it comes to public police, the proving of false imprisonment is sufficient to obtain a writ of habeas corpus.
- Police Brutality
- Police Brutality is the intentional use of excessive force, usually physical, but potentially also in the form of verbal attacks and psychological intimidation, by a police officer. It is in some instances triggered by "contempt of cop", i.e., perceived disrespect towards police officers.
- Police corruption
- Police corruption is a specific form of police misconduct designed to obtain financial benefits, other personal gain, and/or career advancement for a police officer or officers in exchange for not pursuing, or selectively pursuing, an investigation or arrest. Another example is police officers flouting the police code of conduct in order to secure convictions of suspects — for example, through the use of falsified evidence.
- Racial profiling
- Racial profiling refers to the "use by law enforcement personnel of an individual’s race or ethnicity as a factor in articulating reasonable suspicion to stop, question or arrest an individual, unless race or ethnicity is part of an identifying description of a specific suspect for a specific crime." It is often confused with the more comprehensive offender profiling. The practice has became particularly controversial in the United States due to resulting violations of civil rights.