Blue Code Of Silence Research Paper

The Unwritten Rule

Blue code of silence, the blue wall, the cocoon of silence and the blue brotherhood all contain the same meaning: to remain quiet. The blue code of silence is an unwritten rule that is embedded within police forces that displays the honor and loyalty officers are required to posses, by not following the code would be considered an act of betrayal. The silence portrays both solidarity and protection for the officers within the organization, and follows years of tradition. While the code proves to play a major part in the roles and lives of the police officers it causes much controversy such as society can lose their confidence in the truth of the police. The thesis of this paper is that the code of silence does have a significant role within the policing community in both positive and negative ways; loyalty allows officers to become joined within a brotherhood that will promote and maintain protection and mutual trust, misconduct takes advantage of that loyalty as a majority of police misconduct remains hidden and will go unpunished which could potentially lead to further misconduct and the negative views surrounding misconduct has brought attempts to reduce the code of silence through whistle-blowing.

A main factor of the code of silence is loyalty, to always be there for the other officers even if that means to lie or hide things for them. Loyalty is required and significantly important in police work, in fact it is the second of six truths of policing (to always remain loyal to fellow colleagues.) When future officers first begin their training in police academies the importance of loyalty is embedded into the studies: many areas of the training require the officers to be placed into groups so that th...

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...ther purposes such as protecting other officers from areas such as misconduct. The code of silence allows police officers to seemingly get away from the misconduct they have done, they are rarely held responsible. The number of cases where officers get acquitted is enormous and that is due to the code of silence; officers will provide false testimonies against other officers to protect the officers, as well as they will not tell on the other officers. Due to the amount of misconduct being acquitted it allows an increase in other members joining the brotherhood and could lead to further misconduct. Therefore, due to the increase in misconduct there has been an expansion of whistle blowers within the police force. Whistle blowers are attempting to reduce the code of silence with regards to police misconduct; to have police suffer consequence’s for their actions.