Police Ethics

The Corruption of Noble Cause

Michael Caldero, Jeffrey Dailey, Brian Withrow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351668675
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Droit
• Subtopic: Droit pénal

Police Ethics, Fourth Edition, provides an analysis of corruption in law enforcement organizations. The authors argue that the noble cause—a commitment to "doing something about bad people"—is a central "ends-based" police ethic. This fundamental principle of police ethics can paradoxically open the way to community polarization and increased violence, however, when officers violate the law on behalf of personally held moral values. This book is about the power that police use to do their work and how it can lead police to abuse their positions at the individual and organizational levels. It provides students of policing with a realistic understanding of the kinds of problems they will confront in the practice of police work.

This timely new edition offers police administrators direction for developing agency-wide corruption prevention strategies, and a re-written chapter further expands our level of understanding of corruption by covering the Model of Circumstantial Corruptibility in detail. The fourth edition also discusses critical ethical issues relating to the relationship between police departments and minority communities, including Black Lives Matter and other activist groups. In the post-Ferguson environment, this is a crucial text for students, academicians, and law enforcement professionals alike.

Part 1
Value-Based Decision-Making and the Ethics of Noble Cause

The police are essential to democracy. By ensuring that no person is above the law, the police protect citizens from victimization. Through the enforcement of the law, police ensure that no individual or group violently asserts its will over the public order. In the United States, we tend to take the police for granted. Yet, over the past 50 years, we have witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the destabilization of many countries in the Middle East and Africa. Many nation-states have failed, or are barely surviving, with collapsed internal security controls.

Democratic countries walk a fine line between the anarchy and civil violence of collapsed states and the suppressive citizen controls exerted by highly authoritarian regimes. It is through the commitment of the police to the citizenry, their capacity to control crime, and their ability to act according to the rules they enforce—that they also are not above the law—that democracy survives.

The rules for enforcing the law and the rules for protecting citizens’ rights can conflict with each other. Police are expected to stop, detain, sometimes seize, and, if necessary, injure or kill citizens when they are engaged in wrongful behavior. There are many complex rules of process, both in terms of law and in terms of department policy, that surround each of these expectations. These rules are expected to conform with criminal and civil law in issues of due process. And there is a great deal of confusion and lack of agreement when it comes to holding police accountable for these rules.

Consider, for example, an illegal search of a suspect in order to find out if he or she is carrying drugs. Is an illegal search wrong? How about when an informant calls the police to tell them he or she knows of a suspect who has drugs in his or her house. Should the police use the informant’s information and raid the house? And what if the informant is himself a police officer who believes that the suspect is a drug dealer, wants to look around the house, and then “stiffs in a call” as if he were a citizen. Is that alright? And what if the police officer crashes the door, the suspect defends himself with a weapon and is killed, and there are no drugs in the house, only a homeowner defending his or her property. Is that alright?

All of the described activities are acts committed on behalf of a good end—getting bad guys off the streets. Some of them are all also illegal. They represent noble-cause corruption—when an officer breaks the law in order to achieve a good end.

Over the past 100 years, the police have been transformed in important ways. Economic corruption has diminished dramatically. The quality of police professionalism has increased. And the police have become much keener in the ways of public-order maintenance as we move toward a multicultural society. The police are committed to doing good, to finding and arresting bad people, to the assistance of victims, and to protecting communities; in short, they have become professional in ways that many police reformers sought throughout the twentieth century.

Yet, their commitment to what we call the noble cause carries a special peril. Crime control sometimes seems to require behavior that is not particularly legal. For example, officers might “testilie,” which refers to giving false information as sworn testimony, in order to take a felon off the streets who has an extensive, violent rap sheet and whom the officer believes to be a community danger. This is the sort of behavior that we call noble-cause corruption.

The topic of noble-cause corruption, like the examples provided earlier in this chapter, frequently involves behavior that cannot be easily defined as good or bad. Sometimes trying to define what is wrong with it is like grasping at smoke. If an officer conducts a search in an inappropriate place, in the process uncovers information about a serious crime, and then does not mention that the search was at that moment illegal, is she a “golden apple” or a “rotten apple”—a good cop or a bad cop? How about when the officer adds drugs to a search warrant to justify a detailed search even though the officer does not have any probable cause that drugs will be found, but has probable cause on other, larger items—a car for example—and wants to fish around a bit? It is sometimes difficult to tell what is right or wrong behavior, particularly when an officer is committed to a good outcome. It is easy to overlook small procedural details of the law in the service of good ends. Yet noble-cause corruption goes to the heart of democratic process in the United States. Noble-cause corruption represents the authority of the sovereign to intercede with impunity into the affairs of the citizenry, and there is no democracy in that.

Chapter 1 provides background on the noble cause. The opening chapter argues that the proper understanding of police morality and ethics begins by understanding that they are value-based decision-makers. This means that they are strongly affected by the values and beliefs that characterized their upbringing, and they bring these value dispositions to their work. The central elements of value-based decision-making are the noble cause and two of its important occupational elements, described as the “smell of the victim’s blood” and “the tower.” The central theme of this book—the responsibility of command in noble-cause corruption—is discussed using examples from diverse sources, including Abu Ghraib. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the literature that has developed elements of value-based decision-making and the noble cause.

Chapter 2 considers the hiring process. We argue that in most departments, the process is a collection of complicated procedures that converge on a simple purpose—hiring officers who have a particular set of values. Hiring, we argue, is a values-based process aimed at ensuring that recruits carry values sympathetic to the noble cause. Early organizational experiences refine and redirect the way in which officers enact their beliefs in the noble cause.

Chapter 3 looks at administrative dilemmas related to the noble cause. This chapter presents a perspective on the profound difficulties encountered when we hold public servants accountable for their behavior. Three accountability dilemmas are presented. The chapter concludes that there is a limit on the extent to which accountability is a reachable goal.

Chapter 4 assesses efforts to measure police values. It argues that police values are not learned on the job, but are fully in place when officers are hired. The psychology of emotion is presented to describe the powerful pull the noble cause has on individuals. This chapter concludes with a re-consideration of police morality and discretion, arguing that discretion among the police is highly overrated. Given our knowledge of police values, it argues, how can we not know how they will act?

1
Value-Based Decision-Making: Understanding the Ethics of Noble Cause

Key Terms

• Abu Ghraib
• “The Asshole”
• bounded rationality
• British Broadcasting Company (BBC) Prison Study
• culture
• “Dirty Harry” problem informal organization
• just means
• maturity
• means-ends conflicts
• negative concept of police culture
• noble cause
• passion
• perspective
• power of self
• Stanford Prison Experiment
• the tower
• value-based decision-making

A police officer is the willful embodiment of the state’s morality. An officer’s actions are the morality of the state made kinetic, making sure that bad people (those who have broken existing laws, or have been accused of doing so) are dealt with, public order is asserted, and laws are enforced. The power carried by a police officer defines the limits of individual freedom in a most immediate sense: the authority of the state to seize someone’s body or to initiate a process that can end in situational justice, jail or prison, and, in rare cases, death. To do their work, police place their lives on the line for strangers, they arrest criminal suspects, cite or arrest misdemeanants, (sometimes) distribute rough justice for troublemakers, and they deal with victims who may be traumatized or grotesquely wounded.

To do their work, officers enact the morality of the state, represented facially by the existing laws on the books. They must have a clear and straightforward notion of what behavior is right (legal) or wrong, based on whether or not the exhibited behavior conforms to existing law, and what kind of a person is good or bad. Every decision they make about the conduct of their work is value based, enacting the broader moral standards of the state in the way in which they control their beats. They are in fact and deed value-based decision-makers, and their work is morals work, through and through.

The (perceived) morality of the state is codified in its system of laws. This code is invigorated and enlivened by many groups who encourage the harsh treatment of people they believe are bad. Legislators clamor about how the courts are too lenient. Citizens repeatedly call to complain about neighbors who create public disorder. Business people rail against local panhandlers who do their work in front of their store and chase off customers. Prosecutors are resolutely focused on the conviction of suspects. Judges are selected for their toughness toward those convicted of crimes. “Mothers Against Drunk Driving” is one of many citizen groups who advocate the punishment of particular classes of criminal behavior. Schools want resource officers to protect kids from bullies. And police organizations push for increased criminal penalties that, it is widely believed, will dissuade individuals from committing crime (based on the theoretical deterrent effect of increased penalties for specific crimes).

The ethical dilemma faced by many police officers is in adapting the powers they are endowed with by the state to the way in which they carry out the state’s justice. One of the most common moral dilemmas faced by officers is whether or not to bend some of the rules limiting their behavior in order to deal with people they believe are criminals or troublemakers. Officers indeed have a great deal of power, power they can use to really hurt people, by asserting rough or situational justice, but far greater power by starting the legal process that will put them (the perceived “bad people”) in jail or prison. Many officers, and the reader may be among them, have seen colleagues engage in legally questionable behavior and that some prosecutors, superiors, and judges wink and look the other way. Officers may pressure suspects to find out what they are up to, so that they will not cause problems on their beat. Indeed, many officers see a cruel world in which good citizens are routinely victimized and a court system that is unresponsive, and believe they have few alternatives other than to enact their own particular brand of extralegal justice. This view is reinforced by the commitments officers have to their beats. Many of them are convinced that if they don’t control it, no one will, and that they must sometimes set the laws and policies designed to control their behavior aside in order to do something about bad people. Police power should be used for the good of citizens and the community, even if laws or policies must be sometimes bent to do so.

Most ethics books will tell an officer to turn off that power; that police are creatures of the law and that due process and administrative protocols are rules that must always be followed. Police, according to this view, are supposed to be dispassionate law enforcers, robots in blue, enforcing the law equally and without bias or predisposition. We don’t buy it. We have a different perspective. We don’t tell police to turn it off—it can’t be done. We counsel instead that it be used wisely.

We have a different way of thinking about ethics. We call it value-based decision-making. The values carried by police officers determine their decisions to intervene in the lives of citizens, what they do when they intervene, and the way in which they bring interventions to a conclusion. And the most important values that mobilize officers are embodied in the noble cause. The noble cause is, for most officers, the touchstone from which value-based decision-making occurs. Indeed, values are the cornerstone of the work police do—they dispense justice by controlling people. So we’ll start this chapter with a discussion of value-based decision-making and what it means to police work.

Value-Based Decision-Making

The presentation is in a converted meeting room, and ten tables have been set up for Mike Caldero’s presentation. Approximately 30 commanders and mid-level supervisors are present.

Mike looks at each officer, a quick scan, brief pause on each one. Contact. He begins. What do you think of bureaucracies?

“We work in a bureaucracy.”

Oh, I know you work in a bureaucracy. I spent my whole life in the bureaucracy. I was a police officer for a long time. Now I teach, which means that I’m still in a bureaucracy. (A few officers smile). But what do you think of bureaucracies? Are they efficient? Are they effective? Let me put it this way. When you need to get something done, does the bureaucracy help you get it done?

Many officers in the room chuckle. One officer is not amused. He responds: “We are the bureaucracy.”

OK, Mike thinks, here we go. Exactly. And you use the bureaucracy to get work done. It provides a set of rules and procedures that enable the different parts of the organization to work together. Isn’t that right? This is a clear challenge for so early in the presentation. But understanding the noble cause requires challenges, and it’s good to get some of them out of the way up front.

How well do you all work together? Do your different shifts work closely with each other? Your line officers, how well do they get along with you? How about promotions? Do your officers feel good about the work they do? How about standard operating procedures? Any complaints?

Mike gets stony looks from some of the officers. A captain responds. “We get along fine with our line officers. We don’t have those kinds of problems here.”

OK, I’ll take that. What if I were to get a group of your line officers together and asked them? What would they say?

A lieutenant looks at the captain, and then says “There are always some officers that complain. Some of them don’t understand that being a police officer requires a lot of work. Self-responsibility.” He is stating a mantra Mike has heard in every department: “Officers today don’t seem to understand the self-responsibility that officers used to have. There are some who just don’t want to do any work.”

Oh boy, aren’t there some complainers! There are always some officers who can’t be satisfied, who complain about everything. You know, I find that in every department. What do they complain about? Any sergeants in here? Sergeant, what do they complain about?

“Well, sometimes they complain about promotions.”

How about brass? Administrators? You guys do community policing—do they complain about that? How about you sergeant, do you think they complain about the way they are evaluated?

“Well, sometimes, sure, all of that. Some are just complainers.” The sergeant shifts uncomfortably in his seat. But he is favored and will gain promotion quickly in this ...