“If someone was taking money, shame on them,” said a current delegate in the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association. “But if someone in my family got a summons, I would try to help them out.” He added, “If one of my cops says to me, ‘My father got a ticket, can you help me out?’ I say, ‘I’ll do what I can.’ ”

State Senator Eric Adams, a Democrat from Brooklyn and a former city police captain who has been talking to his friends on the force about the issue, said such professional courtesies did not amount to corruption. He said it was a norm in law-enforcement agencies around the country. “Other states are laughing at us,” Mr. Adams said. “They’re saying, ‘Are you guys kidding me?’ ”

But to other officers, those who have tried to steer clear of breaking rules, however small, fixing tickets after they are written represents unfairness. “The city is full of decent people who don’t know cops, and I can only imagine their frustration in learning that the other half of the city that is either related to police or best friends with a cop can get their ticket fixed,” a long-serving officer in the Bronx said.

He said the scandal represented a department “lurching toward complete legitimacy.”

The scandal has caused divisions between police officers, who expect to be hit the hardest, and superiors, whom many say were often the drivers of the ticket-fixing practices. That has led some to express a feeling of abandonment — a sense that the high-level officials are feigning shock over a system everyone happily embraced.

Because some of them were the subject of wiretaps or grand jury proceedings, union officials are offering none of their usual reassurances, adding to officers’ sense of foreboding about what comes next. For one officer, Marco Varela, his unsuccessful campaign for second vice president in the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association elections led him to about half the city precincts, though he was getting by far the frostiest receptions in station houses in the Bronx.

“When you go in there in a suit, they look at you strange, like you’re part of Internal Affairs,” said Mr. Varela, who is assigned to a patrol car in Upper Manhattan.

“The atmosphere in the Bronx makes it the toughest place to work,” he added. “It’s the toughest place to work in the world, moralewise.”