Police Officer Corruption Essay

In an ideal world, police officers and law enforcement agencies would not be plagued by corruption, and would be the pillars of ethical conduct to which all other citizens would aspire. However, in a world such as ours, police officers all too often display signs of corruption, violate the values they once held so high, and let their sense of morality fall silent. Not all police officers are corrupt, but those that are soil the image of law enforcement and serve to further alarm an already wary public.

The Ideal of the Police Officer

The ideal of the police officer is a powerful one. Police officers in training aspire to ideals such as those espoused in the NYPD mission statement, such as law enforcement, peace making, the quest to make

Police officers who have begun to see themselves as above the law often rationalize such unjust actions as the planting of evidence with a line of thinking that starts with the noble cause of catching criminals at any cost, and that deteriorates quickly into the planting of evidence on innocent individuals who had the misfortune of being connected to a criminal. There are also incentives within some police departments that reward such police activities as drug busts, which leads to the temptation to plant drugs on unsuspecting citizens, a temptation that is all too often succumbed to.

One place to begin would be to set up a system by which hiring practices are made more rigorous. Perhaps police officers should be made to take a few philosophy classes on ethics in addition to their formal training, and perhaps this practice should extend itself into periodic ethics and morality workshops for police officers who have graduated from training. It is never too late nor too early to begin to teach morality, so perhaps beginning police training with a strong ethical foundation and continuing to build upon this foundation will prove to be part of the solution.