Observations On Police Misconduct

Ethics help to guide people to do the right things and are even more important when people have control or power over others. They are important no matter what your profession is, but law enforcement and anyone in the criminal justice field have to make ethical decisions on a daily basis. One of the reasons listed for the importance of ethics in the criminal justice system is that some of the professionals in the criminal justice system have to use physical force or coercion on others as a part of their job (Banks 3). Many times law enforcement officers have to choose in the blink of an eye whether to shoot or use force or not. Without ethical rules, there would be force used in situations when it was not necessary and innocent people could …show more content…
This statement is backed by the article, Women in Prison: Sexual Misconduct by Correctional Staff, which tells of research done in 1999 about how sexual misconduct is treated when it comes about. This article states that less than twenty percent of allegations are proven (GAO 1999). Sexual misconduct can be considered a lack of ethics, which are defined as “moral principles (Byers 2002.)” In the GAO article, there is research done to find out how allegations have been handled and for many of those allegations there was not any proof that any sexual misconduct had happened. This lack of evidence was the main reason some of the people accused of the misconduct were not punished. It was also learned that some of the correctional staff would resign or leave after accusations. This seems to say that they knew they were doing wrong. During the research, it was learned that there was not proper training on how to deal with sexual misconduct. If there was not proper training in that field, then there was most likely no specific moral or ethical training. If there were stronger and more persistent ethical training, then some misconduct could be …show more content…
In Criminal Justice Ethics, the example from the film Dirty Harry. In this film, instead of usually moral and ethical ways to find out the location of the girl they were looking for, the officer instead tortures the suspect (p. 33). The officer in the example from earlier, with the officer trying to make the young man confess to having cocaine when he honestly did not, would be considered an officer trying to use dirty means to obtain their goal. Proper ethical training would not eliminate every bad decision made, but it would help eliminate some of the