Phil 250 Police Ethics
What are the Three Primary Functions of Policing?
Enforce laws
Maintain order
Provide service to community
What do ethical questions involving the police arise from?
Recruitment, selection and training of officers
Culture of policing
Police tactics
The organizational climate of police departments
Context of police ethics has multiple levels
Individual officers and their personal characteristics
The structure and culture of the organization employing them
The community the organization serves
The issue of unethical or illegal behaviour in police
departments is often attributed to rotten apples, which can be attributed to the complex structure and culture within the organization. If the structure or culture is defective, opportunities for unethical or illegal behaviour develop, leading to a rotten orchard that affects both individual officers and the departments they serve.
Types of Dirty Police?
Individual Officers “ Rotten Apples”
Communities Served “ Rotten Orchards”
Police Departments “Rotten Barrels”
The individual context of police ethics
the behaviour of specific officers employed by an agency, officers and their behaviours are influenced by characyetistics such as age, race, time in service, gender etc
Individual characteristics and police ethics
James Fyfe and Robert Kane conducted a study comparing the personal and career histories of 1543 officers involuntarily separated from the NYPD for Cause 1975-1996 with a random sample of academy classmates. They found that officers with prior arrests, traffic violations, failure in other jobs, lack of education, marginal performance at the academy, and white males were more likely to be involuntarily separated. The study aimed to identify individual characteristics of officers engaging in unethical or illegal behaviors.
What is the Rotten Apples Theory?
On an individual level, unethical and illegal behaviour by police is the product of rotten apples
What is the response of rotten apples theory?
Fire and/or prosecute the rotten apples
What does the screening process for hiring do?
Tries to weed out the rotten apples before they make it into the department
A common refrain in police departments is that officers engaging in illegal behaviour are rotten apples, and it's unfair to bias them. This theory is popular because it's easy to implement and doesn't involve challenging core practices like recruitment, hiring, and training. Departments use background checks, polygraph examinations, drug tests, and psychological screenings to ensure high levels of integrity.
Identify the rotten apple
Denounce the officers, and get rid of them
Move on
What is the rotten barrels theory?
Organizational aspects of police ethics.
Agencies create a rotten environment if they:
Tolerate deviance
Fail to consistently enforce rules
Tolerate silence toward coverups about officers’ unethical or illegal behaviour
The community context of police ethics
Police are embedded as part of an institutional framework of community with social, economic an political forces
How forces affect departments can be understood by examining agency’s history - some departments have a long stable history of unethical and illegal behaviours by officers other experience instances of scandal followed by reform and others have a long, stable history of minimal problems
Scholars suggest that community expectations about police departments integrity and ethics exert pressures on organization and affects a department ability to resist, conform or combat questionable behaviour by office
What is rotten orchards theory?
Community expectations about police department’s integrity and ethics exert pressure on police organizations
How does it affect departments?
Affects the departments ability to resist, confront or combat questionable behaviour by officers
Rotten Apples
Level of analysis: Individual
Description:
Individuals lacking personal integrity circumvent barriers like backkgoruound checks or polygraphs as part of prehiring processes and become officers
Limitations:
Does not question recruitment/selection or training processes
Assumes processes can be tweaked to better predict rotten apples
Ignores organizational factors or occupational/cultural factors that foser unethical behaviours
Rotten Barrels
Level of analysis: organziational
Description:
Orgnaizational culture of departments, including tolerance of deviant behaviour, code of silence or inconsistency in addressing misconduct
Creates a work environment that fosters unethical/illegal behaviour
Limitations:
Fails to accept that some rotten apples exist and will circumvent safeguards designed to exclude them
Fails to recognize that community culture can influence organizational policies and individual officer behaviour
Rotten Orchards
Level of analysis: community
Description:
Community values are such that using force, lying, etc are acceptable behaviour by members of the community and those values influence behaviour while on the job
Limitations:
Assumes culture of the community is far more influential that it may be or that officer acculturation will negate personal morality
What is the Values-Neutral Perspective?
Recruitment and hiring are designed to screen out “rotten apples” by screening for character traits like honesty, psychological stability and lack of criminal history instead of specific values
What are the stages of an occupational career of police officers?
Choice: choosing law enforcement as a career
Introduction: what police work is really like
Encounter: first interactions with citizens and their response to police
Metamorphosis: Full encultured into the identity of a police officer
What is the culture of policing?
Consists of a shared set of values, attitudes and norms to guide them
Coping mechanism for the stresses officers confront originating with citizens and supervisors
What are the core values?
Use of force: force deters citizens, conveys group solidarity, achieves justice, shows police are strong - force should not be considered a last resort, should be exercised as a way of deterring people from disobeying officers, conveying group solidarity, achieving a measure of justice and showing the public the police are strong
Time: responds quickly to real calls for service
- can never respond too quickly to real calls for service that involve crime fighting, nor too slowly to garbage calls involving order maintenance ir service to community
Loyalty: trust only other officers
- trust should only be place in fellow patrol officers- the public, administrators and media are out to get you
Fringe Benefits: Gratuities from citizens are both deserved and appropriate
- for what they do and the dangers to which they are exposed, officers are underpaid, rewards extended to them by the public for service or appreation constitute compensation that is deserved and appropriated
Justice: sometimes best served on the street, not in court
- because the CJS is weak and untrustworthy, justice is sometimes best served on street based on personal rather than legal considerations
Discretion: citizen characteristics matter: law enforcement
- except in most serious instances, enforcing the law should be based on what it says but also on the characteristics involved
A police gratuity
something of economic values, goods or services, given by a member of the public to a police officer for any number of reasons
What are anti- gratuities arguments?
Gratuities are inherently wrong
Gratuities improperly obligate recipients to givers
Gratuities corrupt the officers accepting them
What are pro-gratuities arguments?
Gratuities are conceptualised as an exchange
Recipients’ intent determines the ethical quality of exchange
Contingencies
opportunities/incentives that encourage unethical behaviour
Moral experience
encounters with unethical behaviour by colleagues that force officer to accept, escape from, or reject the behaviour
Apologia
situational-specific rationalizations for unethical/illegal behaviour
Stages
the slippery slope of an officers descent into corruption
The Presence of rules
due to so many rules they often get broken and so officers are reluctant to report violations when they have broken rules