The Costs of Being Honest and What Serpico Can Teach Us About Reducing Corruption Aksel Sundstrom - Democratic Audit
go to original November 29, 2016

David Birney as Serpico in the eponymous TV series, 1976 (Wikimedia)

In remote parts of countries like Mexico or Afghanistan, widespread bribery involving customs officers, policemen or civil servants fuels criminal behavior such as smuggling. Tackling this kind of institutionalized corruption is one of the main challenges impeding social progress in countries where the rule of law is weak. Using qualitative interview data from places where corruption and violent intimidation are endemic, I tried to gain further understanding of the problem.

While corruption is a topic of immense interest for policy-makers, there are gaps in our understanding of how we can reduce it. Perhaps more fundamentally, do we understand the drivers of small-scale corruption in the first place? Not only are we struggling to find the right cure for this sickness, but we also have trouble diagnosing it in the first place.

So why do officials accept bribes from people who want to break the law? The anti-corruption discussion has usually focused on civil servants’ calculation that the gains from corruption will outweigh the potential risk of getting caught, and the potential ramifications of losing their job. According to this interpretation, the solutions include increased salaries, higher penalties for wrongdoers and more elaborate monitoring. Others have suggested that bribery may also be a problem of collective action, where very few officials in a highly corrupt administration want to be the only ones who do not take bribes.

But do these explanations take violent contexts into account? Returning to the situation of a customs officer in Mexico or Afghanistan, these perspectives seems to pay insufficient heed to the role of violence and the physical security of officials. A bureaucrat in such a setting is likely to come under pressure from criminals who wish to break the law. In the political sphere, previous studies have used the term plata o plomo (Spanish for “silver or lead”), meaning “your money or your life”, to signify situations where agents were forced to engage in corrupt practices. This is relevant to our understanding of bureaucratic corruption too.

...These are not the only countries where there are costs associated with honesty. There are similar anecdotes from administrations in richer parts of the world. The New York City Police Department in the 1960s was made famous by the Hollywood movie Serpico, starring Al Pacino. In reality, Frank Serpico – a patrolling policeman who received death threats and became a pariah among colleagues after testifying about corrupt practices – witnessed in 1971 the consequences of refusing bribery: “The atmosphere does not yet exist in which an honest police officer can act without fear of ridicule or reprisal from fellow officers”, he said.

See full PDF “Violence and the Costs of Honesty: Rethinking Bureaucrats’ Choice to Take Bribes”

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