It is a widely accepted idea that one of the main consequences of corruption is the distortion of decision-making by public authorities, which results in unequal treatment of the subjects of law, meaning that public officials favour some citizens at the expense of others. Widespread corruption in security sector institutions as the barometer findings show, 12F 8 is inevitably accompanied by unequal treatment of citizens by these institutions. In 2019, 76.8% thought that corruption in the State Police was very or somewhat widespread, which increased to 79.3% in 2020, as is shown in graph 5. How corrupt do you think the State Police are? 45 42.24 40 37.8 35 41.5 34.62 30 25 20 15.07 16.1 15 10 6.46 4.0 5 0 A lot Somewhat A little Not at all 2019 2020 1.61 0.6 Don’t know Graph 5: Perception of corruption in the State Police. The perception of corruption in the justice institutions is also high. Graph 6 shows that 57.9% of the citizens think that the Office of the Prosecutor General Office is very corrupt, while graph 6 shows that of all the institutions, the courts received the highest percentage of responses perceiving it as highly corrupt, 64.7%. Likewise, only 10.5% of citizens think that the courts are a little or not at all corrupt, marking the lowest percentage compared to other institutions. 13F 9 8 Arjan Dyrmishi,“Albanian Security Barometer National Survey 2020”, 56-58. 9 Ibid., 77. 14