Ethics in Policing

1. Ethics in Policing Richard N. Holden, Ph.D. Central Missouri State University

2. Crisis in Law Enforcement • According to Human Rights Watch, an international public watchdog group, federal prosecutors in 1998 brought charges against police officers in less than 1% of the cases investigated by the FBI involving allegations of police abuse. • Earl Ofari Hutchinson • The Plain Dealer • March 23, 1999

3. Crisis in Law Enforcement • The tragic killing of Amadou Diallo, shot 41 times by four New York City police officers, has focused attention on police brutality. This attention has revealed the police practice of racial profiling, which includes stopping and searching people--mostly blacks and Latinos--because they fit a certain “profile”. Tony Newman USA Today

4. Crisis in Law Enforcement • “…the perception of too many Americans is that police officers cannot be trusted.” • Janet Reno, Attorney General of the United States

5. Ethics in Policing Professional Police Conduct

6. Primary Responsibilities • Serving the Community • Safeguarding Lives and Property • Protecting the Innocent • Keeping the Peace • Ensuring the Rights of All to Liberty, Equality, and Justice

7. Philosophy of Minimalism • Best Approach to Law Enforcement. • Principle of “Least Intrusive Action.” • “Select the Option that Solves the Problem While Doing the Least Amount of Harm.”

8. Professional Standards of Behavior • Police Officers Will Be Responsible for Their Own Professional Conduct. • The Necessity for Professional Growth is Prevalent in All Professions, Especially in Policing. • Officers Will Seek Opportunities For Expanded Learning and Continuous Development of Relevant Skills and Concepts.

9. Police Deviance How Bad is the Problem?

10. Police Deviance • Brutality • Abuse of Authority • Lying • Sexual Misconduct • Theft • Alcohol/Drug Abuse • Deliberate Inefficiency

11. Brutality • Individual police brutality is a often a product of immaturity. It is caused by fear. • Institutionalized brutality is a by-product of: • Poor training. • Peer support. • Lax/incompetent supervision.

12. Abuse of Authority • Legal. • Physical • Verbal.

13. Lying • Falsifying Reports • Falsifying Evidence • Cover-ups. • Lying in Court

14. Sexual Misconduct • The patrol car has been referred to as a “rolling bedroom” due to its heavy use for sleeping on duty and illicit sexual encounters. • Sexual Bribery/extortion. • Sexual liaisons. • Voyeurism.

15. Crimes for Profit • Theft of Property • Bribery • Extortion

16. Alcohol/Drug Abuse • Drinking on duty is more common than most people suspect. • Drug abuse among police officers has been a growing concern for over a decade. • Officers have ready access to both alcohol and drugs.

17. Deliberate Inefficiency • Sleeping on Duty • Shirking Duty

18. Organizational Pathology Causes and Symptoms

19. Mismanagement by Budget • Public agencies are not punished for inefficiency; they are rewarded. • An agency failing to spend its annual budget will lose funding for the following year. • Overspending the budget is often rewarded by an increased budget.

20. Parkinson’s Law • “Work expands to fill the time allocated for it.” • C. Northcote Parkinson • There is no relationship between organizational growth and organizational effectiveness.

21. Peter Principle • “In any organization, people rise to their level of incompetence.” • Lawrence Peter • Ultimately, all management positions may be filled with incompetent people.

22. Organizational Life-Cycles • Five stages in the life of an organization • Adolescent • Prime • Maturity • Aristocratic • Bureaucratic

23. Adolescent Stage • Time of organization’s creation. • Productivity is low. • Original policies formulated. • Training cliques develop. • Value system begins to form. • Morale is high. • Strong informal interaction.

24. Prime Stage • Organization is results oriented • System is stable. • Productivity is optimal. • Organization acutely aware of external demands. • Support services are predictable and tuned to the needs of line elements. • Emphasis on planning but coupled to high expectations.

25. Maturity Stage • Organization’s sense of urgency declines. • Risk taking declines; less emphasis on research and development. • Aspirations are held low as both labor and management enjoy past success. • Procedures and policies become more important as formal climate develops. • Birth of internal political systems seeking power at organization’s expense.

26. Aristocratic Stage • Business as usual. • Organization becomes backward looking. • Ritual becomes important. • Tenure becomes important. • Dress codes are developed and understood. • Jargon stage—subculture language fully developed . • Training focuses on organizational symbols and getting along on the job rather than doing the job.

27. Bureaucratic Stage • Production falls as organization slips into stagnation. • Research and development ignored. • Management paranoia, political infighting, and blame placing. • Guiding principal: “Put it in writing.” • Unit isolation enforced. • Private organization – bankruptcy!

28. Trained Incapacity • Trained incapacity refers to that state of affairs in which one’s abilities function as blind spots. • Training a person to do a job one way simultaneously trains that person to not do the job any other way. • Training for one set of conditions becomes dysfunctional when conditions change.

29. Occupational Psychosis • Occupational psychosis is a product of the socialization process. • The new member must replace values and beliefs with those of the subculture. • In policing this is known as the “John Wayne” or “Wyatt Earp Syndrome.”

30. Occupational Psychosis • Symptoms • Dualism-viewing the world as good vs. bad. • “You are either for or against me.” • Loss/warping of sense of humor. • Distancing from outsiders. • Preoccupation with organizational value system

31. Fundamental Ambivalence • A form of occupational blindness or tunnel vision. • A way of seeing becomes a way of not seeing anything different. • Every event is screened through the value laden viewpoint of the subculture.

32. Sanctification • Sanctification is the process wherein bureaucratic norms become sacred values. • Agency members develop an over-reliance on organizational symbols and provide these symbols a legitimacy of their own.

33. Fear • A by-product of the sanctification process is organizational fear. The values become so accepted no one dares challenge the system.

34. Goal Displacement • Adherence to rules, originally devised as means, becomes transformed into ends. • Ends become obscure or lost. • Means become sacred. • People/organization lose sight of their mission.

35. Espirit d’Corps • Group cohesiveness, necessary for successful military operations, has a destructive component for civilian agencies. • It is the belief that the “worst” of us is better than the “best” of them. • We have “bad cops” because “good cops” protect them.

36. Organizational Arrogance • Caused by a perceived power differential. • The organization is powerful, therefore the member is also powerful. • The citizen, representing no one, is not powerful and not worthy of respect. • The result is institutionally sanctioned rudeness.

37. Police and the Minority Communities Overcoming History

38. Police-Minority Relations • There is a history of discrimination against minorities by all aspects of society. • This history is centuries old. • The problem is compounded by the absence of economic power in minority communities.

39. Police-Minority Relations • Minority frustrations with police practices are compounded by a lack of support from the majority community. • Police support derives mostly from the majority community, thus increasing minority community isolation. • Minority communities have few means to obtain redress for concerns with questionable police practices.

40. Improving Police-Minority Relations • Open communication between the police and minority communities. • Establish community task-forces to identify problems and propose solutions. • Initiate changes in department procedure based upon task-force recommendations.

41. Improving Police-Minority Relations • Ultimately, it is the behavior of individual officers towards members of the minority community that will determine the department’s relationship with the minority community. • No amount of good will can overcome improper police conduct!

42. Ethics Ethics is a Management Issue!

43. Ethics • Department value statements and public relations initiatives are useful. • Police conduct, however, determines the public’s perception of law enforcement. • Ethics is about behavior. • Behavior is determined by accountability.

44. Ethics and Accountability • "Police departments like to claim that each high-profile abuse is an aberration, committed by a `rogue' officer. But these human rights violations persist because the accountability systems are so defective." • Kenneth Roth executive director of the human rights watch.

45. Accountability • The greater the officer’s ability to avoid accountability, the greater the amount of police misconduct. • The police subculture often defeats accountability. • We have bad cops because good cops protect them.

46. Limitations Values and Beliefs Accountability Policies and Procedures

47. Experience vs. Procedure • Many officers rely more heavily on experience than department procedure. • Personal experience is inherently flawed; it rests on subjective impressions filtered through biased expectations. • Officers often remember when a technique to a problem works, but forget the many times in which a similar approach did not work.

48. Over reliance on emotional sources: War stories Personal experiences Rumors Fictional crime stories. Organizational mythology Under reliance on factual sources: Established procedures Training Case law Research Reports Professional Journals Text books Police Information Sources

49. Police Subculture • Corrosive influence. • Emphasizes collective experience over training and procedure. • Emphasizes group loyalty over duty. • Built on distrust of outsiders. • Alters definition of police success.

50. Department view Community focus. Problem addressed. Appropriate approved procedure used. Accurate record of event. Actions taken legally/morally defensible. Subculture view Officer focus. Problem masked. Least demanding procedure used (shortcuts). Self-serving record of event. Actions often questionable, sometimes illegal. Views of Police Success