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Noble Cause
Removing the Culture of Noble Cause Corruption
To the Officers in our State Police Department,
As a Colonel of this force with years of experience in the field, I understand the complexity and nuance of conducting police work. And I also understand the imperative to 'get the collar' as it were, at all costs. However, we cannot pursue law enforcement at the expense of upholding the law.
Frequently, police officers act according to a set of laws and parameters internal to a department's culture. In some instances, this behavior will strain or undermine true legal and ethical expectations of law enforcement agencies. However, there is a moral gray area for many departments, who view this specialized set of parameters as necessary for pursuing the complex challenges of police work. This underscores the concept of noble cause corruption, which allow officers to act according to their own set of rules in order to accomplish what they perceive as the otherwise unattainable objectives of law enforcement.
As Fitzpatrick (2006) explains this tendency, "the 'standard patterns' of decisions made by police are valued...
What seems to work gets used. These patterns reflect the values of the police. The choice of specific patterns over others that may be available and their desirable end results (ready-made solutions) reflect the moral rules police use to make their decisions (choices)." (Fitzpatrick, p.11)
In the present case though, we can see how these patterns have resulted in questionable ethical decisions. Here, planting evidence as a way of apprehending a suspect is an ethical misappropriation based on the otherwise ethical ambition to make a proper arrest. Consequently, falsifying police reports shows an unethical proclivity to amend the facts of a case in order to meet the convenient package designed to justify onsite officer behavior. And in an third instance, lying in court is a clear subversion of the judicial process even if it is done with the positive intention of producing a sentence for a likely guilty defendant.
As we can see, these ethical breaches are all done under the lens of positive intentions. I do believe that the officers in this department desire…
Works Cited:
Fitzpatrick, D.P. (2006). Moving Beyond the Noble Cause Paradigm: Providing a Unified Theory of Ethics for 21st Century American Policing. The Forum on Public Policy.
Holmes, M.H. (2012). Raising the Ranks of Public Sector Leaders. Public Personnel Management, 41(3)
Hoppe, R. (1999). Argumentative Turn. Science and Public Policy, 26(3), 201-201.
Micheli, P.; Schoeman, M.; Baxter, D. & Goffin, K. (2012). New Business Models for Public-Sector Innovation. Research-Technology Management.
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