Ethical Concerns in Criminal Justice: Police Brutality
In the field of criminal justice, it is important to be mindful of the moral or ethical problems which might arise. In a perfect world, police officers, prosecuting attorneys, judges, and juries would always act above board and with the singular interest of seeking out justice. However, this is a highly imperfect world and every society has had an incidence at some point in their history wherein someone abused their position in the process of criminal justice for their own ends. Those involved in criminal justice must be ever mindful of these past abuses and keep a watchful eye on their cohorts to ensure that the occurrence of similar unethical behaviors is kept to a minimum in the future. One of the most controversial aspects of criminal justice in recent years has been the question of police brutality and the consequences of officer's behavior in the criminal case.
Police officers are tasked with investigation and when they have found a plausible suspect it is their job to interrogate and to take the suspect into custody. In the past if a witness or suspect was not forthcoming with information, the officers could use a degree of physical force. In many police departments, this physical pressure garnered information and a suspect's admittance of responsibility although how much voracity can be placed on information received in this way must be questioned (Locke 1966,-page...
There were unquestionably and unsurprisingly severe consequences for such actions; namely false confessions and ultimately the imprisonment and in some cases the eventual execution of innocent persons. Under this order of conduct, officers became used to being able to enlist physical force which some psychologist argue became addictive which led to further and more severe cases of police violence (Skolnick 1995,-page 46). The question of police brutality came up every now and then in the past but unless there was photographic evidence of misconduct, the accusations of the accused were not given much attention.
Due to the actions of those past officers, modern policemen and women must be wary of any action which could be classified as police brutality. In a complete reversal of the past situation, in the modern moment people are too quick to believe that the police behaved in a brutal and unnecessarily forceful way. Even in situations where a suspect is armed and shoots at police, if the officers who take down that suspect use force there is a review of their conduct to make sure that this action was the only one possible to apprehend the suspect. Everybody has a cell phone and video cameras are everywhere ready to record misconduct of any kind in any location (Krupanski 2012). Activists for civil liberties encourage this constant recording of officers as a means of ensuring that behaviors are kept in check and force…
