Police Deviance & Ethics

Police Deviance & Ethics

Police Deviance & Ethics

Introduction

Police ethics is a branch of applied normative ethics. The most well known branches of applied ethics are medical and business ethics. The link between 'theory' and 'practice' is what makes applied ethics different from philosophical ethics. Applied ethics is the field that holds ethical theory accountable to practice and professional practice accountable to theory.

The vast majority of the over 800,000 men and women in the police departments and other law enforcement agencies are ethical. They do the right thing hundreds of times a day. Unfortunately, some are not ethical. Standards have been established to determine how police officers should act. Some of these standards are identified by Joycelyn Pollock, an author of her book, _Ethics in Crime and _Justice: Dilemmas and Decisions (Dempsey & Forst, 2005). The standards indentified by this author include: Organizational value systems or codes of ethics designed to educate and guide the behavior of those who work within the organization; an oath of office, which can be considered short hand version of the value system or code of ethics; The Law Enforcement Code of Ethics as promulgated by the International Association of Chiefs of Police (LACP) (Dempsey & Forst, 2005).

Discussion

Other standards governing police ethics are the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, case law determined by appellate courts and the U.S. Supreme Court, and federal and state criminal laws and codes of criminal procedure. The formal code of ethics is different from subculture values. Violations of formal ethical standards such as use of force, acceptance of preferential or discriminatory treatment, use of illegal investigation tactics, and differential enforcement of laws are all supported by the subculture (Dempsey & Forst, 2005).

Police subculture or maybe it is the actions of the police officers themselves that create police deviance. Whatever the reason is, deviance occurs in policing everywhere around the world not just in the U.S.

Police corruption has many definitions. Herman Goldstein defines it as “acts involving the misuse of authority by a police officer in a manner designed to produce personal gain for himself or other.” (Newton 2003)Police corruption can also be defined as the acceptance of money or the equivalent of money by a public official for doing something he or she is under a duty to do anyway, that he or she is under a duty not to do, or exercise ...