Neal Trautman Summary

The guest speaker for the ethics in law enforcement lecture was Neal Trautman. Mr. Trautman was a founder of the Law Enforcement Training Network, the world's largest provider of police training. Mr. Trautman has worked numerous years trying to achieve a standard of ethics within law enforcement. He believes that integrity is the core of America and also the greatest need for the United States and our law enforcement. Mr. Trautman supports the idea that the people who regulate American citizens and how they behave should be good ethical citizens themselves. Mr. Trautman began the lecture by addressing the importance of ethics in law enforcement and then the lack of training given to address such an important issue. On average 0-2 hours are
spent on ethics throughout a police officer's training. In fact, of the 16,000 law enforcement agencies most of them have never had one minute of ethics training. Mr. Trautman believes that ethics are very important because the toughest decisions in life or a career are always ethical dilemmas and he would like to change that statistic. He feels that by teaching officers ethics and how to react in tough situations that many law enforcement careers would be saved. Often times unethical police behavior is momentary bad decisions caused by anger, lust, greed and peer pressure. These four problems can cause scandals and often destroy people. Scandals are hot news topics and can devastate not only the office, but also the department and the officer's family. Each year 300-400 police officers take their own lives because they feel as though they have lost everything after a bad ethical decision. Mr. Trautman is striving to decrease the number of suicides and law enforcement officials in prison. He believes that scandals can be prevented. Virtually every significant case of employee misconduct had warnings signs that leaders either ignored of failed to recognize as important, because most scandals start with one person doing relatively small unethical acts and that grows to whatever level the leadership allows. Mr. Trautman currently travels around the country giving lectures about the importance of ethical training in law enforcement. Like most problems, this is a problem that most likely can be solved before it starts by education and training. I agree with Mr. Trautman's views that law enforcement should absolutely have a standard of ethics to live up to. The statistics that he presented are astounding and action is definitely needed to correct these problems.