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.