The code of silence: Revisiting South African police integrity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In exploring the contours of the code of silence among South African police officers, our 2005 survey of 379 police officers from seven provinces found that a substantial proportion of respondents were keen to protect various forms of police corruption. Between July 2010 and August 2011 we engaged in the second sweep of the survey, encompassing 771 police officers (commissioned and non-commissioned) from nine South African provinces. Our results provide further evidence of the presence of the code of silence covering various forms of police misconduct. At least one quarter of the respondents would protect a fellow officer who verbally abused citizens, covered up police driving under the influence (DUI) accident, accepted gratuities, or failed to react to graffiti. At least one out of eight police officers showed willingness to cover up internal corruption, striking a prisoner, a kickback, a false report on drug possession, and protection of a hate crime. The results further indicate that the respondents’ willingness to adhere to the code of silence is directly related to their estimates of whether other police officers in their agency would protect such behaviour with silence, as well as to their estimates of the seriousness of misconduct and expected discipline.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".