Any corrupt organization anywhere will do its very best to protect itself from reputational loss whenever possible. It just happens that in some societies, the amount of protection those organizations can provide to themselves without quick consequences is much higher than in others.

In the US, a lot of supposed government organizations are basically immune to pressure from elected officials. A police department can do more to harm the standing of a mayor than the mayor can do to said department. In fact, sometimes you even have state involvement to make sure the mayor looks bad. See, for instance, the wonder of the St Louis Police Department. The state votes in a different way than the city, and the state passed laws to take over the local police department. Thus they control budgets and leadership, even though the actual taxpayers that foot the bill are local. As you might imagine, this leads to very strange incentives.