Noble Cause Removing the Culture of Noble

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 for their utility in providing "ready-made solutions" to the problems at hand. 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 to uphold the law in a way that is at once ethical and effective. Unfortunately, our internal culture has produced a scenario where the latter priority overshadows the former. From a review of the present case, I've learned that many officers have simply learned corruption as a standard practice in their procedural pursuit of arrest, reporting and sentencing.

At the heart of this distorted internal culture is the need for more effective training regarding constitutional proceduralism. While there is no way to reduce the complexity of police work, we can take steps together to ensure that our officers are armed with the tactical skills and knowledge to navigate this complexity rather than simply to wash it away with unethical practice. For instance, in the case of planting evidence, we believe that improved officer training will enhance the ability of officers to acquire legitimate search warrants, to make better assessments of likely guilt before seeking out perpetrator evidence and to accept either innocence or the conditions of a fair judicial proceedings in contexts where evidence is not readily forthcoming.

For our officers, I believe that a comprehensive procedurally training course must be undertaken. Likewise, it will be important to create an internal reward and recognition system for those who do practice law according to constitutional fairness. Part and parcel to this training will also be training with new surveillance technologies which can allow for more accurate gathering of admissible evidence and sensitivity training to reduce the impact that racial profiling may play in unethical procedural behavior.