The Blue Code of Silence in Law Enforcement

The Ethical Bar Will Rise for Law Enforcement in the Future.  Why?

Abstract

This article looks at the question of why the ethical bar will rise for law enforcement in the future. It examines how technology has made it so that officers’ actions and words are now recorded on body cams, and everything they do and so now will be scrutinized by the public—so this necessarily entails a higher ethical bar. It also looks at the rise of cancel culture and how this is impacting the constant call for higher ethical standards in law enforcement. It finally examines the application these findings and what it will mean for law enforcement going forward.

Introduction

Law enforcement has come under intense scrutiny since 2020, with the death of George Floyd. Police misconduct is viewed as a reason for protesting and rioting among parts of the public community, and the costs are tremendous. Police simply cannot afford to do anything that might be construed as police brutality, corruption or misconduct. Thus, the ethical bar will rise for law enforcement in the future, as there is just too much attention now being brought to bear on police departments.

Discussion of Literature

One reason the ethical bar is rising for law enforcement is the fact that technology has caught up to the practice of law enforcement so that now all officers tend to be harnessed with body cams that record everything that happens between an officer and a person in the community (Adams & Mastracci, 2017). This heightened power of monitoring and recording a situation means that more scrutiny is brought to bear on every action and word an officer of the law does or says. If there is a negative outcome in an interaction between the community and an officer of the law, the community will see the body cam footage and make a judgment call based on how that officer acted (Adams & Mastracci, 2017).

Moreover, the media is always presenting a narrative in its communications and the more that an event can be sensationalized the more likely it is to gain viewers, which helps to increase ad revenue (Wong & Harraway, 2020). This is a problem as it pertains to the ethical bar because those media narratives are driving responses in the public, particularly among government leaders, who hear from the public and must find ways to satisfy the public whenever it becomes outraged about the latest problem, such as homicide. If an officer of the law is accused of homicide, the event is sensationalized in media because sensationalism drives narratives that provide returns for media outlets (Wong & Harraway, 2020). This creates a dynamic by which heightened scrutiny is coupled with public outrage and media attention, leading to a charged atmosphere wherein a call for increased ethical standards is inevitable. Even if there are already high ethical standards in law enforcement, it does not matter. The outrage, the sensationalism, and the fact that another event has occurred in which an officer is accused of wrong doing is all it takes for the cry for a higher ethical bar in law enforcement. Reason, logic, proper analysis—none of these necessarily enter into the conversation.

There is also the problem of diverging opinions on police: some see police as necessary for maintaining the law and order of a community; others want to defund and abolish police completely. Thus, for example, one portion of communities still strongly believes that police presence helps to maintain order and a sense of safety, even in schools (Turner & Beneke, 2020). However, not everyone agrees with that assessment, and some view police as the problem as there is no trust in law enforcement (Turner & Beneke, 2020). This fact alone complicates the matter. One the one hand, people want more accountability from their police officers; one the other hand, there appears to be an initiative underway to defund the police and remove police from certain communities altogether (Jacobs et al., 2021). But how realistic is a defund-the-police movement? Opponents of this movement suggest that if anything more funding is needed to better train and manage police officers so that they are adhering to higher ethical standards and not violating community norms or failing to live up to community expectations (Koziarski & Huey, 2021).

Thus, police are receiving mixed messages and signals from communities, with some arguing for better training and others arguing for disbanding of police altogether. For the latter, it appears that no amount of training or accountability or elevating of ethical standards will do to satisfy them: they want a community that is free of police interference completely. However, this is likely an unrealistic ambition (MacStuttles, 2020).

One aspect in which there is some consensus opinion is on the matter of the “blue code” of silence (Westmarland & Conway, 2020). In this code, police are often reluctant to report on one another because they view loyalty to one another as more important than any ethical standard that might apply to them. This apparent loyalty to the blue code is a problem for many outsiders who feel that it is a code that reduces accountability and places police outside the law and outside any system of ethics. Policing the police is problematic from this standpoint because of the fact that the police do not take well to people looking over their shoulder (Westmarland & Conway, 2020). As far as they are concerned, their job is dangerous and requires a great deal of trust. They see themselves in many cases as warriors on the front lines of a battleground. If they feel that their fellow officers do not have their backs, they worry about betrayal. They worry that something they do or say might be taken out of context or used against them. If they are going to be enforcing the law in dangerous situations, they believe that they themselves might have to bend the law or act in a way that is questionable so as to be able to enforce the law. In other words, there might arise situations where they have to make judgment calls that ordinarily might be seen as immoral but in their eyes in the heat of the moment made sense. They do not want their judgment coming back to haunt them.

At the same time, police may also feel that because they put their lives on the line every day to protect communities that they are entitled to certain perks that ordinary citizens might not be entitled to. They do not want other officers condemning them or someone from the prosecutor’s office coming after them if they take advantage of a system to benefit from it personally in a way that a community might condemn; they feel they merit this ability to take advantage of a system because of what they do for a living (Westmarland & Conway, 2020). But not everyone agrees with them. The relationship between the prosecution office and police is an important but tenuous one, and if trust is not in that relationship it can suffer as well (Sheidaeian & Abdollahy, 2020).

For that reason, discussing the reasons the ethical bar for law enforcement is likely to rise is a complicate matter. There are so many different issues that must be considered in this subject that it is not just a matter of looking at what a community feels about police action; it is not just a matter of looking at police brutality, or at the sensationalized media reports that upset communities, or even at the legitimately and validly reported media stories of police actions that deserve to be censured. The issue of law enforcement in America is one that has always been problematic. Whenever a group of people is tasked with having authority over another group, it can lead to problems. Can these problems be addressed by raising the ethical standards?

Because of the divergence in public opinion, the question of what to do about the ethical bar persists; the only permanent feature of the public debate is that the bar must be elevated again and again and again. It is as if there is no other reasonable answer to police misconduct because the culture of tolerance and moderation has disappeared, replaced by a culture of outrage and cancelation (Chiou, 2020). The function of cancel culture in the debate is to make sure that anything short of perfection—any sort of human failing—must be eliminated, denounced, and be used as the pretext for more and more draconian standards and punishments, holding officers accountable, satisfying the outrage mob, and simply making law enforcement even more impractical and unrealistic. The problem overall is that culture itself has become corrupted and the same ethical standards that society aims to apply to law enforcement are ones that society does not apply to itself. People in society are helping to facilitate a degradation of culture by insisting on unfair standards.

At the same time, there will be backlash. As Williams (2020) points out, judges, officers of the law and legislators all have to be the light in the face of injustice in society. That is the argument Williams (2020) makes—as though he had no sense of the saying that the light shined in the darkness and the darkness grasped it not. It does not matter if the light is shining among officers on a routine basis: if the culture around them has become so dim and dark and full of antagonism that it will not accept the light, what good will it do to shine it? The assumption is that there is still enough good will among members of the public that the light, if shined by officers, will be reflected back at them in a positive manner. Yet, today’s cancel culture is more and more aggressive and outraged, seeming to suggest that the culture is moving more towards intolerance and violence than towards ethics. It is an ethics-for-thee, not-for-me type of environment, and everyone is lashing out at everyone else.

Such an environment creates many problems when it comes to understanding why the ethical bar for police will rise. Some police may feel they are unfairly being punished and held to higher expectations than are reasonable considering the nature of their work and the fact that they are constantly having to make judgment calls that arise out of situations that cannot be foreseen or predicted in any policing manual. Police are entrusted with the ability to make split-second decisions. For them, it is a matter of trust. If the community refuses to trust them, why should they stay in that position and try to enforce the law? If ethical standards and expectations are raised to a level that the officer feels he is handicapped and unable to enforce the law effectively out of fear of reprisal from the community or from his own department or from the prosecutor’s office, what will his ultimate reaction be? There may be a mass exodus of police from law enforcement as they come to the realization that putting their lives on the line for an overly critical and, to them, unappreciative community is just not worth it.

Yet that is the situation that has arisen. The era of political correctness has returned and it has returned with more force than ever before. The current climate is one that focuses on accountability, and that is not likely to change in the near future, as the current generation coming into power has been educated under the principles of political correctness and social justice. Police are being held to high standards and are now on a short leash when it comes to interacting with the community.

Application

Law enforcement will necessarily have to adapt to this environment in which calls for increased scrutiny and higher standards remain persistent. The cancel culture of today will never be satisfied because perfection of conduct can never be achieved. The end result will be a deterioration of the ranks of police members, as individual officers become frustrated by unrealistic expectations and the feeling that any misstep will mean their lives are over. As ranks are depleted because no one wants to be involved in law enforcement, the state will turn to less scrupulous individuals to fill out positions; this will in turn lead to disaster as law enforcement becomes filled with individuals who do not care about ethical standards. The blowback from this degradation will be tremendous and it will harm society substantially.

If communities do not want to see the debasement of their local law enforcement then they need to find ways to advocate for stronger ethical standards while being cognizant of the needs of police officers to feel protected from what they view as unjust persecution. Both sides need to be able to come together to understand one another. Empathy is required in this situation, and empathy is lacking in times when tempers and passions flare. If there is going to be a just, fair and reasonable solution to the needs of both communities that feel they are being preyed upon by unaccountable police and to the needs of police who fear they are being persecuted for making decisions that some do not approve of, it is only going to come by way of an empathetic meeting of the minds. This will require patience and understanding and most important of all some charity on both sides.

Additionally, what is required today is a strong leader to push back against unrealistic expectations. There is nothing wrong with high ethical standards; in fact, they should exist. But the problem is one of unrealistic expectations. People will make mistakes—but it does not mean they should always and in every case pay a harsh penalty. It is as though no one remembers Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. It is a 19th century novel that deals with these very same issues, but what it calls for is understanding, mercy and forgiveness—not cancelation and hatred. Yet cancelation and hatred are the drivers of the current culture, and the current culture is what is setting the course for higher ethical standards.

What will these standards be? How will they be applied? Who will enforce them? What will it lead to? There is no calm reflection on these points because the outrage mob does not take time to consider. It takes time only to shout, harangue and stampede. This is not a way to bring about better change. It has utility in terms of destroying what already exists. By creating unrealistic expectations in law enforcement, the danger is that officers of the law will see that they are being set up to fail and they will retire and find work in some other field.

Yet the law must still be enforced—and so who will enforce it when the old guard leaves? The new guard will enforce it, and the new guard will come from the very same ranks of cancel culture elitists that are now calling for higher ethical standards. They themselves will not adhere to those standards because it is a standards-for-thee, not-for-me mentality they possess. When such people are in charge of enforcing the law, the outcome will be extremely unpleasant for the community as a whole. It will be an era of totalitarianism like that seen under Mao in China. Already it is happening. Law enforcement officers are leaving the field. They may be replaced by even less qualified officers who have no personal ethic whatsoever.

A personal ethic is even more important than an arbitrary ethical standard that will be difficult to enforce, considering that the blue code of silence is unlikely to ever go away. It exists within law enforcement for a reason, just as bees have a stinger: it is there for protective purposes. Bees do not actively go out seeking to use their stinger, but they have it in case they are threatened. It is the same for law enforcement; they have the blue code of silence for protection. It is an unwritten code, but it is important to officers nonetheless. Communities have to understand why it exists and why officers feel the need to adhere to it.

Because it exists, communities feel that they have to step up to hold officers accountable in spite of such a code—but that can be like shaking the hornet’s nest. What will be the result? Instead of trying to shake the hornet’s nest, a better approach might be to try to hire officers who have a strong personal ethic and to trust them in whatever situations that might arise to make the best decision. Not everyone in a community is going to agree with all decisions that officers make—but it is not a perfect world, and no amount of standards-raising is going to make it a perfect world. The harder people push for increased standards, the riskier it becomes for corruption and self-serving to become institutionalized in a system.