Two Bad Apples

Why merging two “bad apple” police forces makes things worse, not better

The idea that you can fix failing police forces by merging them assumes the problem is scale or resources. In reality, the problem is culture, incentives, and power. When you merge two dysfunctional organisations, you don’t cancel out the failures — you compound them.

1. You aggregate toxic culture instead of correcting it

Each force brings:

• learned rule-breaking

• normalised non-compliance

• informal codes of silence

When merged, those norms reinforce each other. Officers quickly learn which behaviours are “safe” because both legacy organisations tolerated them.

2. Accountability becomes harder, not easier

Bigger organisations mean:

• longer reporting chains

• more plausible deniability

• more opportunities to deflect blame (“legacy issue”, “pre-merger practice”)

Misconduct gets lost in complexity.

3. Bad leadership rises, good leadership exits

In mergers:

• politically adept, risk-averse leaders thrive

• whistleblowers and reformers are sidelined

• institutional survival becomes the priority

The result is a defensive mega-organisation, not a reformed one.

4. Power concentrates without matching oversight

You create a force with:

• greater coercive power

• wider jurisdiction

• unchanged (or weaker) oversight

That’s how systemic abuse scales up.

Bottom line

You don’t get one good force from two bad ones.
You get a larger, more opaque, and harder-to-challenge bad force — with higher stakes when it fails.