Police Ethics Training Research Paper

overn the rest of our lives. Each person chooses which norms they will follow in their daily lives. Just because people are taught the same norms, does not mean that they will all react the same way to any given situation. (cite) Police officers react the same way, even though they are taught to put their own personal norms aside and follow the procedures from the department. The only values officers must employ in the delivery of their police services are the values of their profession. They are not to use their own personal values in their decision-making processes while enforcing the law.(cite) Recruits come from all different types of backgrounds, different upbringings, different religions, and different moral values. Their veterans or
colleagues possess differing moral foundations, so much so that they must never be used as the proper measuring stick for ethical policing. Time in rank presupposes that supervisors, though possibly conflicted regarding certain moral issues of the job, have enough training and experience to understand and respect the ethical tenets of the profession and of the organization, and act accordingly. Paramilitary organizations are founded on this premise.
(cite)Being true to the ethics of police service means being true to the values and the ideals of the chosen profession. Police ethics training digs deeper into the meaning of the profession’s values and ideals in an effort to reconfigure recruits’ personal value systems and to obtain policy compliance measures. There is no time for boot camps in policing to break down recruits’ values systems and build them back up in step with their agency’s expectations. Yet ethics training focuses more on the issues and problems that street officers are confronted with when there is no supervision and they must rely on their instincts and training. Ethics lectures must specifically address the organization’s expectations and police values that address the best practices and past failures of the profession. Street-level discretion is learned by training, experience, and reinforcement through the disciplinary process. Discipline has always been a training tool—effective in the military as well as in
policing.(cite) For years, police ethics trainers have recognized a gap between the realities of street policing and the ethics training curriculum that simply taught “coffee shop ethics” and the ills associated with the “acceptance of gratuities.” Street-level discretion from an ethical viewpoint lacked in its analysis and application pertaining to the dilemmas associated with the badge. This chasm between such realities and training would hinder the “development of police knowledge, impede the development of genuine professionalism, diminish the quality of police services, invite the use of personal whim as the basis for discretionary judgments, and unnecessarily expose police officers and departments to liability suits.” (cite) Further complicating this gap, is the rationalization associated with corruption for the noble cause and the lost sense of professionalism.
The people that the police offers serve do not have to abide by the Constitution or the ethics of a particular profession. Out of frustration, repeated victimization, or desperation, citizens simply demand that the police clean up their neighborhoods from societal predators, rampant crime, and common disorder. The publics values regarding the dispensation of police services will rarely mirror those of the profession.(cite) This is an ethical dilemma police officers face on a daily basis. They really want to serve the people, but that service must adhere to the constitutional and police department rules. Often times police “corruption is produced by the pressures society has imposed on police. Citizens place the police in a position of tension, where they are expected to enforce the law but also to obey regulations about how they may obtain information and gather evidence and police. They are also expected to enforce personal morality while respecting constitutional rights to privacy and due process” (cite)Enforcing personal morality can lead to corrupt police
rationalizations. These ethical dilemmas often lead to a sense of something called noble cause corruption. This occurs when good officers substitute in their personal values for the values of the profession and the law. It is an ends-justifies-the-means rationalization associated with public service wherein officers break the law to enforce the law. It is unconstitutional policing; an illegal use of authority and power, but not for personal gain. Rather, the objective is to rid society of its predators, no matter what the means, as an ultimate goal.(cite) This is when officers cut corners to circumvent the constitutional guidelines promulgated for them in their profession and rationalize such illegality as a means to an ordered end. Granted, the end is a noble cause, but the means used is the less-discussed side of noble cause corruption. Such street-level rationalizations cloud the police mission and, when discovered, undermine the efforts of those in the profession who are committed to just ends. Whether citizens arrested are murderers, rapists, pedophiles, drug dealers, or terrorists, they are society’s predators and it is law enforcement’s job to put them away. Yet bending of the law under a police rationalization that such ends justifies the use of illegal means is a critical issue that must be addressed in training curricula. The planting of evidence, falsified testimony, privacy violations in information gathering, and the arbitrary detention of citizens without legal justification are examples of noble cause corruption. Illegal fishing expeditions by law enforcement can result in exclusion of evidence, as so-called “fruits of the poisonous tree,” and dismissal of all criminal charges. The American Exclusionary Rule was specifically carved out in U.S. Supreme Court case law to prevent constitutional noncompliance by the police. For years, academicians have been researching and writing about noble cause corruption, and yet it still is not a common topic in academy training. Some would argue that low-ranking subordinates should never have the option to engage in such occupational rationalizations, while others have suggested that street-level decisions are made without regard to “the formal administrative and legal protocols.”Others have suggested that poor administrative attention to this problem and the occupational stressors it produces have fueled its existence through a looking-the-other-way supervisory mentality: “formal organizational values impose pressures that may lead to noble cause corruption. Aspirations for promotion, ‘implicit quotas for arrests, directives from administrators, self-esteem, moral ideological commitments all put pressure on the individual officer to lie or otherwise subvert the formal values of law enforcement and lead to violation of suspects’ rights or other unethical behaviors” (cite).