Teaching Police Ethics: What to Aim At? (From Teaching Criminal Justice Ethics: Strategic Issues, P 35-58, 1996, John Kleinig and Margaret Leland Smith, eds.)

• NCJ Number: 170175
• Author(s): M Davis
• Date Published: 1996
• Length: 24 pages
• Sale Source: Anderson Publishing Co
• Publication Type: Conference Material
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Paper presented at a workshop on criminal justice ethics education held June 6-8, 1996, at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.

Annotation

Before focusing more narrowly on what might be the objective of a course on police ethics, this essay first observes that criminal justice ethics might be understood either as a form of institutional ethics or as a species of professional ethics.

Abstract

Criminal justice ethics might review ethical questions that emerge out of the social practice of criminal justice, or it might focus on the ethical concerns faced by its professional practitioners. This essay focuses on the latter, specifically on police as criminal justice's most visible practitioners. The author details a number of general aims that he believes to be achievable through teaching occupational or professional ethics: increased ethical sensitivity, increased knowledge of relevant standards of conduct, improved ethical judgment, and improved ethical will power. He gives a number of reasons for integrating police ethics into the criminal justice curriculum. The first is that such integration reinforces what is taught about police ethics elsewhere. The second is that such integration helps students develop the habit of thinking about ethics whenever thinking about police work. Thirdly, as a matter of fact, many students will get no police ethics before graduation except as part of the technical curriculum. In discussing the rationale for a philosophy course in police ethics, the author argues that such a course should be optional. Students should take the course because they want to see what philosophers have to tell them about police ethics. Although the aim of the course should be to understand police ethics as a rational undertaking, the primary reason for offering the course regularly will be to ensure that the program has an expert in police ethics to call on for help in developing ethics materials, thinking through ethics problems, finding appropriate ethics readings, and otherwise providing support for the pervasive method. Appended summary guide to ethical decisionmaking and 26 notes