Ethics in Law Enforcement
Ethics is foundational to law enforcement and its importance is
highlighted in the intense search for honest, moral, and ethical law
enforcement candidates. The average law enforcement hiring process takes
between six and eight months and includes a highly invasive background
check, a lengthy interview, followed by a polygraph to check for
accuracy. Law enforcement organizations expect complete honesty
throughout all parts of the application process and demand that honesty
to continue through all aspects of the job. Honesty, integrity, and
ethical officers are the backbone of any law enforcement organization.
Several topics within law enforcement fall into what could be called
relative ethical topics and should be explored. Additionally, there are
several solutions that will ensure ethicality within criminal justice
organizations.
Deception, or lying, is in some ways an essential part of the policing
process but can also be taken too far into criminality. Accepted lying
refers to deception that is generally considered part of the job and can
include all kinds of trickery used to apprehend or entrap suspects
(Peak, 2012). Deviant lying, however, is described by Peak (2012) as
“officers committing perjury to convict suspects or being deceptive
about some activity that is illegal or unacceptable” (p. 281). Eastvedt
(2008) lists “lying or dishonesty” as “ways for people in the
criminal justice community to seriously damage and destroy their
integrity” (p. 66). Deception is a curious topic when discussing
ethics, but it is clear that the often-debated line must not be crossed.
Gratuities is another grey area of ethics. Like deception, minor
gratuities are a normal part of a law enforcement officer’s day, but
gratuities in excess is synonymous with corruption. Peak (2012) cites
the Knapp Commission’s terminology of “grass-eaters” or
“meat-eaters” to describe police officers’ relationship to gratuities.
A grass-eater is described as on officer who accepts gratuities that are
given voluntarily and will sometimes solicit minor gratuities.
Meat-eaters, on the other hand, are officers who regularly, and even
aggressively, solicit gratuities and search out situations where they
can exploit people for person gain. Gratuities are surely a slippery
slope that can result in officers sliding into all types of corruption
(Peak, 2012).
Gratuities have the potential to be the start of a slippery slope to
greed, of which there is temptation abound in the criminal justice
field. Law enforcement officers are in a seemingly endless cycle of
temptation and they are surrounded my crimes and criminality. The
temptation to greed can motivate officers to a myriad of types of
corruption including crimes relating to drugs, bribes, prostetution, and
other abuses of power.
Several solutions, or partial solutions, exist for law enforcement
organizations when it comes to hiring and maintaining an ethical
workforce. As previously mentioned, strict expectations on hiring the
right people cannot be overstated. Additionally, proper ongoing ethics
training, including regular training on policy and procedure, is
necessary. Chilton (1998) asserts that standardization is necessary in
ethics training in order to avoid what he calls “the ‘Pinocchio Theory’
problem of personal, idiosyncratic moral judgments in the administration
of criminal justice” (p. 40). Law enforcement organizations would also
be wise to set strong organizational values in an attempt to “shape the
standards of professional behavior”(Peak, 2012, 285). An organization’s
culture is often perpetrated by it’s public organizational values.