Читать книгу Police in America - Steven G. Brandl - Страница 31

One form of unethical conduct occurs when the police use illegal means in an attempt to accomplish good ends. For example, in an attempt to detect and prevent crime, an officer may stop and search citizens without the reasonable suspicion that is legally necessary. To solve a crime, an investigator may not inform suspects of their right to remain silent, which is legally required. This conduct is not legal, nor is it ethical. These actions are clearly problematic in a society that expects its police to be fair and just.

good ends: The desired goals of policing.

Sometimes means are legal but perhaps not ethical. An example is when the police use deception to identify and apprehend criminals. In particular, when officers go undercover and buy drugs from an unwitting citizen or lie in the interrogation room to get a suspect to confess, there is usually little debate about the goodness of the goal, but sometimes there is concern about the appropriateness of the way by which the goal was achieved. There may be ethical concerns even when conduct is legal.

Another type of situation that raises ethical concerns is when the law does not explicitly prohibit or allow certain conduct. For example, in one case,³² the police wanted to identify associates and co-conspirators of an offender, arguably a reasonable and worthwhile goal. To do so, they used her personal information to create a fake Facebook page. At the time, these police actions were neither legal nor illegal, but they were potentially unethical nonetheless.

Finally, some ethical concerns regarding police conduct lie outside of the means-ends distinction because the goals being pursued are not appropriate. These situations relate to police corruption. Legitimate goals of policing are not present in most forms of corruption. For example, when officers seek to maximize personal gain through theft or bribery, ethical (and legal) concerns emerge. As noted earlier, one of the difficulties of policing is defining and measuring good policing. At the very least, one dimension of good policing is ethical policing. It is a worthwhile challenge to figure out how policing can be made more ethical.