Abuse of Authority Among Police Officers as Perceived by the Community: Its Effects to Police Community Relation

Police officers are given a lot of power to help protect and secure the lives of the citizens and their properties. However, police often abuse their power through the overuse of force, corruption, sexual misconduct, bias-based policing, and failure to maintain police ethics. The abuse of power initially leads to the police and community relationship distortion. In addition, the misconduct of bad cops is overblown and influences the community that all cops are the same. This created a normative principle which is called the rotten apple principle. This study featured a descriptive method design which contains a complete demonstration of a quantitative research methodology regarding the abuse of authority among police officers as perceived by the community and its effects on police-community relations. A structured questionnaire was created and administered to provide a data-gathering instrument formulated by the researchers and verified by the research experts. A sample size of one hundred was used, of which fifty were drawn from members of the public and the other fifty from members of any government workers. To determine the significant influence of the independent variables on the dependent variables, the following data were categorized and examined using frequency and percentage, mean, and simple linear correlation analysis. The usual kind of abuse perceived by police officers by the community is the authorities' abuse of power. The following acts of abuse are commonly committed on their patrol and outside police posts. This created a misalignment and snap of trust in police authorities by the public, which also led to fear affecting the police-community relation. Therefore, the research study recommends that the police must re-establish and repair the police-community relationship. This can be accomplished by taking the first steps, which will help to initiate police-community cooperation and involvement.