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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a conceptual article on police deviance and its multi-faceted forms. It seeks to address the lack of an adequately formulated framework in the literature of the breadth and depth of police misconduct and corruption. The article argues for the use of a proposed 'sliding scale' of police deviance by examining the nature, extent and progression of police deviance and crime using research in Australia and Canada as illustrative case studies. This sliding scale is designed to research, capture and store, and hence extend the knowledge base of what constitutes police deviance at the level of the individual, the group and the organisational contexts of policing. As such, the conceptual framework is a robust yet flexible research tool and its utility as a sliding scale constitutes a step forward in advancing the knowledge on police deviance and criminality through adopting an integrated and holistic approach to managing such knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]