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Truth about police code of silence revealed
The terms ‘Blue Code’, ‘Blue Wall’ or ‘Code of Silence’ refer to the law enforcement departmental rule of refraining from reporting on the misdemeanors, mistakes and offenses of fellow police officers in the event they are interrogated, in official investigations, about any act of misconduct that involves a coworker. This Blue Wall is symbolic of the loyalty between law enforcement officials in any given police force. For maintaining this loyalty, even scrupulous officials might be coerced into turning a blind eye to law enforcement brutality cases that may cause further harm to innocent civilians by ensuring they don’t get their due justice. Furthermore, law enforcement culture defends and promotes this code, along with police brutality. All cities and states have police departments in place for maintaining public peace and enforcing city and state laws. Within democratic republics, law enforcement officials are required to maintain law and order in society whilst simultaneously taking care not to violate the human or civil rights of citizens (Trautman 2000).
The abovementioned issue of the law enforcement blue wall rule must be resolved post- haste. The government requires an entirely fresh police accountability approach for systematic identification and segregation of good and bad...
However, this cannot occur if the police brotherhood, unions, district lawyers and the brass collaborate and uphold their blue wall rule when it comes to cases of law enforcement violence, including shooting at and even killing civilians (Grisham, 2016).
Exposure is one potential way to prevent the penetration of this code into police departments. A number of states have adopted measures within their police training institutions and departments for promoting blue code exposure. A majority of cities require candidates seeking admission into academies to pass criminal background checks. The use of further background checks, psychological assessments and polygraph testing increases particular law enforcement departments’ ability of choosing candidates with lesser likelihood of tolerating misconduct. The employees of such departments undergo a basic training course which provides instructions on ethical conduct, reinforced, in certain instances, through classes and seminars conducted once every year (Grisham, 2016).
A large number of anti- blue code or blue code exposure campaigns have been initiated. Among the earliest campaigns was New York’s 1970 Knapp Commission (whose formal name was the ‘Commission to Investigate Alleged Police Corruption’), led by Mayor John V. Lindsay. More than two…
References
Grisham, C. J. (2016). What is "The Blue Wall of Silence"? Retrieved September 18, 2018, from https://priceofbusiness.com/what-is-the-blue-wall-of-silence/
Trautman, N. (2000). Police code of silence facts revealed. In Annual Conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, available at http://www. aele. org/loscode2000. html.
Workman-Stark, A. L. (2017). Inclusive policing from the inside out. Springer.
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Furthermore, there is often a veil of silence from witnesses in these types of assaults, which makes investigation very difficult. However, when an officer exercises the discretion to treat these incidents as lesser-crimes, he reinforces the devaluation of the gang members and actually increases the validity of the gang culture. Furthermore, gang violence does not occur in isolation, and it is unfair to the non-criminal members of gang-afflicted communities
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