Criminal Justice Faculty Publish Peer-Reviewed Article
Dr. Haci Duru (Assistant Professor) and Dr. Joseph Cochran (Lecturer) in the Department of Criminal Justice, published a piece on modeling police corruption with agent-based modeling in the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice.
Abstract
Police corruption, especially in the form of bribery, is a severe social problem in many societies. However, neither the extent nor the factors contributing to police bribery are well understood because of data limitation issues. Observing and quantifying such bribery is incredibly challenging, as it is usually considered illegal and unethical for police to accept and ask for bribes. Agent-based modeling can solve such data limitation issues because it allows for the realistic modeling of hidden behaviors. This study uses an agent-based computer simulation to investigate a threshold model of police corruption, more specifically, bribery. The authors assume that agents have a threshold regarding bribery, which may be conceptualized as either an honesty threshold or a risk threshold. The threshold value is a dynamic variable randomly assigned to each agent, and each interaction between citizens and officers possesses the potential to change the threshold of each agent.